I'm writing to you tonight from home, off work for the next several days. Tonight I watched a fantastic movie called "Passage To Marseille" (1944), a WWII adventure story starring Humphrey Bogart, directed by Michael Curtiz. Man, I keep discovering new Bogie movies every time I search him in the library database! Just when I think I've seen 'em all I find another one, and this was one of the best ones yet.
As the announcer intones at the beginning of the film, the overall story is about the Free French Air Force, a group I had never heard of before. Everyone has heard of the French Resistance, but I did not know they had an air corps. The airmen were actually based in England, hidden on a large dairy farm. Their planes were parked in barns and everything was tucked away out of sight so that a passing German reconnaissance crew would never suspect their presence. Their pilots were Frenchmen who had escaped the German occupation of their country and were now prepared to fight back from their base in England.
The story involves multiple uses of flashbacks (including flashbacks upon flashbacks), so after we see Bogart heading out on a bombing run (and yes, he is playing a French airman but talking like Bogie), the story then retreats to the past to show us how he came to be a tail gunner for the Free French in the first place.
A French merchant ship is sailing through international waters in dangerous territory. German subs could be anywhere. Looking into his binoculars the Captain spies a small object bobbing in the water. It turns out to be a small canoe, holding five men who are in very bad shape. The men are rescued and pulled aboard the merchant ship. They are French and claim to have rowed their way from a Venezuelan river, where they were part of a gold mining crew. Their story sounds far fetched, and Sidney Greenstreet, who is onboard the ship as a French Major en route to Marseille, suspects that the men, who include Humphrey Bogart in their number, are actually escaped convicts from Devil's Island.
Sidney Greenstreet specialized in playing evil, dominant characters and he is doing so here, but he is right about the rescued men. They are indeed prison escapees, from the notorious Guyanese island of Cayenne. Now it is time for a flashback within a flashback to see how each of them came to be incarcerated there.
The middle of the plot has to do with the men's fate, and ultimately with that of the entire crew and the ship itself. Who is in charge here? Is it the menacing Greenstreet, who as a Major outranks everyone on board? He is a German appeaser, who is okay with Hitler's occupation of France. He demands that the captain return immediately to Marseille so he can turn the men in to the Nazi authorities who are running the show there. However, he has strong opposition in the person of the legendary Claude Rains, himself a French officer but one dedicated to the Resistance. Rains - a WW1 hero in real life - sides with the merchant ship's civilian capitan, who declares that the men will not be turned in, because they have declared their loyalty to France and are ready to fight for their country. That is the real reason they made the effort to escape the Devil's Island prison. There are no patriots like the French, that's for sure. But good for them I say, at least in their current, non-Napoleonic incarnation.
The French are not wimps. So there!
"Passage To Marseille" shows that the French Resistance fought with every means available to rid their country of the Occupation by the Nazis. Try to imagine if an invading army was standing in the streets of America, ordering you around, telling you what to do and where you could go and where you couldn't. That would be a frightening scenario, would it not? But many of the French stood and fought, even though they had to do so in surreptitious ways, because it was either fight or die for them.
Humphrey and his cohorts do eventually make it to England, where they keep their promise and join the Free French Air Force, and the final twenty minutes of the movie involves a pivotal mission for the group. Bogie also has a wife and son waiting for him in the countryside. He always asks permission to extend every flight so he can pass over his house and drop them a letter, enclosed in a metal pipe. There is a lengthy subtheme involving Bogie and his gorgeous wife Michele Morgan, and it is a major plot point, but I shant describe it to you as I have church in the morning, and this is yet another one of those movies with enough story development to fill a book, which makes it Epic with a Capital E, even with a relatively short running time of 109 minutes.
If you are a fan of WW2 movies, this one is an Absolute Must See. There are good aerial combat scenes and even a little bit of stock footage showing very scary tracer fire. Again I must say, how the world got past WW2 I will never know. All you have to do is watch the real life stock footage to see that it was literally Hell On Earth.
There is too much plot in "Passage To Marseille" to fully describe it to you, which is all the more reason for you to see it. Director Curtiz reunites Bogart, Greenstreet, Rains and even Peter Lorre from his classic film "Casablanca". Lorre plays one of the rescued convicts, and the rest of the large cast is, to a man (and the beautiful Michele Morgan), uniformly excellent.
Two Huge Thumbs Up for "Passage To Marseille", a must see for Bogie fans and WWII buffs.
See you in church in the morning. Huge love until then. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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