Wartime Bogart Part III: Passage to Marseille

It has been a long time since I posted on Wartime Bogart, and sadly, my small series will end here (Action in the North Atlantic was a disappointing advertisement for the US Navy, and not worth much comment). Passage to Marseille is a magnificent, flawed, and colourful film that raises the problem of patriotism when you think your own country is a coward. The Free French, a movement you don’t often see on-screen, are the heroes of Bogart’s second-last wartime picture. If political Hollywood movies have shown us one thing, it is that every cause has to be “personalized” for the hero.

More on that later. First, I should give a little synopsis of Passage to Marseille. Capitaine Freycinet (Claude Rains) presides over a Free French airbase tucked into the green pastures of rural England. He tells a curious war journalist about the history of the enigmatic Jean Matrac (Bogart), one of the pilots. Matrac was an anti-appeasement journalist in France who is framed for murder. His wife Paula (Michèle Morgan, less successful in America than in native France) vows she will wait for his release from Devil’s Island in Guiana. There he meets the other convicts: Marius (Peter Lorre), Renault (Philip Dorn), Petit (George Tobias), and Garou (Helmut Dantine), who plan an escape to the motherland. They are aided by butterfly catcher Grandpère, played by Vladimir Sokoloff, who later appeared in The Magnificent Seven (1960) as the wise old peasant.

Screenwriters Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt structure the unfolding back stories around the character’s own memories. Passage to Marseilles is like a Russian doll, doing to flashbacks what Inception does to dreams. There are flashbacks within flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, all treated by director Michael Curtiz’s gift at voiceover and storytelling.

The narrative gets really interesting when the escaped convicts are picked up by Ville de Nancy, a French ship en route to Marseille. The Maginot Line is about to be outflanked by the Germans, dividing the ship’s crew between Vichy sympathizers and Free French. Representing the fascism Matrac so despises is the corpulent Sydney Greenstreet – a familiar Bogie adversary – as Major Duval. Rains’ Freycinet is not so poor and not so corrupt: he wants to help to patriotic convicts join the fight against Hitler.

Matrac also wants to return to his wife, and it is here that the distinctions between “motherland” and woman are blurred. While he cannot reunite with either France or Paula, he can fly over both, leaving letters after each bombing raid on Germany. There are echoes of the “outlaw hero” here, a man who overcomes disgust in his nation’s politics to fight for the ideal of the nation itself. Robert Ray describes the reconciliation between individual and community in his essay The Thematic Paradigm:

The reconciliatory pattern found its most typical incarnation […]  in one particular narrative: the story of the private man attempting to keep from being drawn into action on any but his own terms. In this story, the reluctant hero’s ultimate willingness to help the community satisfied the official values. But by portraying this aid as demanding only a temporary involvement, the story preserved the values of individualism as well.

When the anti-fascist Captain Malo turns the ship from Marseilles after the fall of Paris, Matrac is initially dismayed: he wants nothing more than return to Paula and his young son. However, as the ship journeys on to the UK he grows committed to fighting until Hitler is defeated and he can come home a free man. Casablanca illustrated this dichotomy more clearly, and Ray holds Curtiz’s previous effort as the ultimate example of the “reluctant American”.

In fact this film feels even more like a Casablanca reunion than Across the Pacific felt like a Maltese Falcon reunion. Most of the same players are here: Bogart, Rains, Lorre, Greenstreet, Dantine, composer Max Steiner, writer Casey Robinson, Curtiz, and even producer Hal B. Wallis. It is typical of the assembly line model of filmmaking, when contracted talent would churn out picture after picture for a studio. Casablanca has often been called an “accidental hit” because it was one of many wartime adventure films Warner Bros. was producing.

 

And yet Passage to Marseilles is still well worth watching. Curtiz can guide you through a hellish night raid on German factories, a mutiny and counter mutiny on the Ville de Nancy, and a ship vs. plane duel involving a particularly devastating Focke Wulf 200. Claude Rains always seems to get the best lines: he tells Manning that Matrac “still fights. The bombs that are dropping tonight are editorials the Germans will understand.” Perhaps most impressive in the film’s mournful and touching conclusion, consisting (spoiler alert) of Matrac’s last letter to his wife and son, also read by Rains. A dedication to those who died for freedom, it is moving and dignified enough to be part of a Remembrance Day’s celebration. After the madcap fun of All Through the Night, it is fitting to end on a solemn note, pulling the celluloid out of the realm of Indiana Jones fantasy and into the real world of mourning and sacrifice.

Wartime Bogart Part II: All Through the Night

Maybe it is Hollywood’s stern approach to World War II in recent decades that makes looking at older, less didactic films more enjoyable. I think that’s what made Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful such a critical and commercial smash – it wasn’t just another dour Schindler’s List (great movie, by the way) about one of the 20th century’s most appalling episodes. What is interesting is how films from the 1940s portray the war, the Nazis, and issues of justice and duty. While Across the Pacific (1942) did not deal directly with the Japanese, 1941’s All Through the Night pits small-time Broadway gamblers against shadowy Gestapo agents.

Critically, it was made in the heat of the moment – not with the cooling hindsight of history. It is hard to find a mainstream World War II comedy released in the last ten years, while Warner Bros. produced an action comedy starring Humphrey Bogart – fresh from the success of the Maltese Falcon – that turns the question of American intervention into an improbable cat-and-mouse story. Think of it as Casablanca-lite. When Gloves Donahue (Bogart) finds the owner of his favourite bakery dead he begins to investigate, finding singer Leda Hamilton (Kaaren Verne) and a network of German spies using antique auctions as a front. I said it was light.

That said, All Through the Night is still deliciously enjoyable, perhaps even more so to a 21st century viewer. The pleasure is similar to what I felt when watching Inglourious Basterds (I guess I was wrong about recent WWII action comedies) or anything that takes an overdone subject and recklessly adapts it to a new genre. Of course, in 1941 the USA avoided Europe and the Holocaust had not been fully exposed to the world. America’s standoffish position was perhaps what gave studios the room to make funny but 100% propaganda movies about the war.

Whatever the circumstances that made All Through the Night possible, a lot of credit must go to writers Leonard Spineglass and Edwin Gilbert. The script overflows with one-liners, wise-cracks, and memorable moments. Armfuls of jokes were handed to William Demarest, who plays Bogey’s gambling pal Sunshine. He wants to catch the Germans “with their panzers down” and chucks an axe at a Hitler portrait (“why don’t you stay in your own backyard?”). Bogart is surrounded by other character actors like Frank McHugh as the virginal Barney, who has to postpone his honeymoon for the entire movie. Now that’s dedication.

There is also a lot of action packed into 107 minutes. Gloves has to fight off agents in a toy warehouse with lighting director Vincent Sherman clearly borrowed from the German expressionists. Now that’s irony. The danger is provided by both Conrad Veidt and Peter Lorre, actors Bogart would later spar with in Casablanca. Lorre always brings a slithery menace to the screen and chews the scenery with sly ease in every scene; it’s too bad he has only a few moments to himself in All Through the Night. He works for Gestapo officer Ebbing (Veidt), who heads the New York spy ring and plans to blow up an American destroyer. Ebbing is a stock Eurovillain, as are all the Nazis. Their austerity is not so different from later Bond villains or the roles Terrence Stamp gets handed these days.

Gloves would probably not have gotten involved in this racket if it wasn’t for Leda, a German expat conned into working for the Nazis. Here is another link to Casablanca: the stalwart American isolationist is only brought into a cause as global as the war by feelings for a woman. While Warner Bros. were promoting intervention, they cloaked this idea in a romantic bathrobe. Gloves turns a political issue into a personal one as he drives around New York looking for Leda, eventually deciding to thwart Ebbing’s plan. He and Sunshine pose as spies and sneak into Ebbing’s underground rendezvous, one of Bogart’s finest comedic scenes. That’s something you don’t see very much in World War II movies: two Americans bullshitting their way through a Gestapo meeting. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tarantino had watched it before writing the end of Inglourious Basterds.

Wartime Bogart Part I: Across the Pacific

If you thought the title Across the Pacific was a misnomer for a film about a group of characters sailing the Atlantic (and never reaching the Pacific) then you might find the rest of the story interesting.

Screenwriters Richard Macaulay and Robert Carson initially had Bogart’s protagonist thwarting a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. When Pearl Harbour broke out before production, the scene was hastily changed to the more exotic and implausible Panama Canal. Since Bogart could not stop a Japanese attack after a Japanese attack actually happened (life imitates art before art is finished?) he was now to stop Hirohito’s agents from gathering intelligence on American defences. Perhaps that is what all propaganda films do. Pearl Harbour would be too realistic, and, considering the outcome of that engagement, counterproductive. Remote Panama, however, was free for use as a narrative end point.

"Psst, Hawaii was hit. Bring out the Central America backdrop."

With Sydney Greenstreet and Mary Astor supporting Bogart in a John Huston production, Across the Pacific feels like a modest Maltese Falcon reunion. Greenstreet plays a variation of his Kasper Gutman villain. He is educated, charming, fat, and deadly. Astor is mediocre as the unremarkable love interest. In fact, the whole film feels unambitious, but even the worst Huston picture is worth seeing. I’d take Across the Pacific over Transformers III any day.