Passage to Marseille - Authentic Region 1 DVD from Warner Brothers starring Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Michele Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Helmut Dantine & Directed by Michael Curtiz DVD
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Rating:  -
A little trickie in the fact that a triple flashback is used. If you're confused, pay attention & watch it again. It's a great story. As the movie unreels: England, a ship at sea, Devils Island, France pre-war & back to war-time England, the one constant thread is Bogart. Check out the cast. You have Raines, Greenstreet, Lorre & of course Bogie. It's the gang from Warner Brothers. With Michael Curtiz directing, you have the atmospherics from Casablanca. Bogies's love in this one is played by the lovely Michelle Morgan, pretty obscure in the US. She even tested for the part of Ilsa in Casablanca. Bogart is a Frenchman, but still world weary, cynical & of course does the right thing.
Convicts escape from the penal colony to go & fight for France. They find themselves adrift at sea & are rescued by a French freighter headed for (where else?) Marseille. Enroute they discover France is no more, it has surrendered unconditionally to Germany. Now what? Excellent war movie, excellent cast.
Rating:  -
Michael Curtiz proved with "The charge of the light brigade" and "Captain blood", he loved to bet for epic films, and in this opportunity, just one year before Casablanca, hired to Bogart as the leader of a bunch of convicts who fervently will make all what they can to escape from the "Devil Island". It's useless the dramatis personae is focused on the insights of these men who wish join themselves to resistance forces in favor of France.
Rating: -
Distributed in 1944, the movie reassembles many of the original cast from "Casablanca"- Bogart, Lorre, Greenstreet and Rains to produce a fascinating movie. The movie represents a microcosm of 1940 France. Each of the characters brings to life a France conflicted. Bogart plays Matrac a crusading journalist who opposes the policy of appeasement with Nazi Germany. For his pains he is beaten and thrown in prison ("Devil's Island") on a trumped up charge of murder. He is bitter and at the beginning indifferent to France's fate. However, he escapes from Devil Island with the aid of an aging freed prisoner who swears each of the escaping convicts to "fight for France!" Matrac and his fellow convicts escape Cayenne but find themselves stranded at sea in a small canoe. Saved by a French ship carrying nickel ore they find their safety far from secure. On board is a colonial officer played by Sydney Greenstreet. He is the arch typical representative of what would become Vichy- overbearing, mutable in his beliefs, opportunistic. Claude Rains plays a patriotic officer committed to France's eventual victory over the Nazi Germany. While the ship proceeds on its journey home, events in France become apparent to the crew. First Germany invades France, then the news arrives that France's armies are in rout, finally the dismaying news that Marshall Petain had formed a new government in Vichy and had agreed to an armistice with Germany. Suddenly the dynamics change. Quickly Greenstreet and his followers seize control of the ship. They emerge as committed supporters of Vichy. The convicts, the ship's captain and Rains fight to take the ship to England and fight on.
One can watch this movie for sheer enjoyment and adventure. However, one can watch this for its historical value in explaining the deep pain and division that faced France in 1940.
Rating:  -
Wartime heroics never seemed exploited in quite so complex a fashion as "Passage to Marseille," directed by Michael Curtiz...
Bogart, a French journalist framed for murder because of his political views and sent to Devil's Island during World War II, escapes from his penal hell with four other convicts and winds up on a French freighter bound for home... Hoping to rejoin the fighting Free French resistance movement, the men, all fiercely loyal patriots, become involved in preventing a takeover of the ship by Fascist sympathizers...
This relatively simple plot line is then surrounded by a series of extraneous plots and subplots which were related in a series of single, double, and even triple flashbacks, making any semblance of coherency virtually impossible...
Bogart's characterization is equally vague and complicated as he maintained an opposing balance of virtue and vice... At one moment he is the picture of idealistic moral righteousness fighting against a callous system, and the next he debased his human nature as he brutally machine-guns some defenseless enemies... His moral platitudes do not balance his immoral behavior, making for ambiguity and confusion...
The most important saving grace of "Passage to Marseille" is the supporting cast headed by Bogart's "Casablanca" co-stars Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre, who all turned in strong character portrayals...
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