In an effort to capitalize on the film that they produced that won the Best Picture Oscar the previous year, the Brothers Warner united as much of the original cast of Casablanca as they could find to tell the tale of convicts from Devil's Island returning to fight the Nazis.
Passage to Marseille might have been a better film if it been done with a straight forward narrative, or only one flashback, from the Humphrey Bogart character. As it is I counted at one point Claude Rains telling his story to newspaper reporter John Loder with a flashback by Phillip Dorn in Rains's narrative. And then in Dorn's narrative we have Bogart flashing back as well. It's a flashback within a flashback within a flashback, within a flashback. Confusing ain't it?
Our Devil's Island convicts are Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Helmut Dantine, George Tobias, and Phillip Dorn. They're picked up by a tramp freighter heading back to Marseille. World War II has already started and midpoint of the voyage, ship captain Victor Francen hears that France has fallen. He starts shifting his course to Great Britain.
Another passenger Sidney Greenstreet has other ideas. He tries a small scale coup d'etat for the Vichy regime on board and meets up with a whole lot of resistance. Greenstreet has the most interesting role in the film. An arrogant militarist, he definitely finds the Nazi dominated Europe more to his liking.
Michele Morgan is Bogart's wife and the only one in the film who is actually French among the principal players. She was a very big star of the French cinema who was lucky to get out. During the war she made films in the UK and the USA. This and Higher and Higher are probably her two best known American films.
Claude Rains is a kinder, gentler version of Captain Renaud from Casablanca. As Captain Freycinet also of the French army like Greenstreet, his politics are a whole lot different. He's an opportunist also in the best sense of the word. He sees an opportunity to deny the Nazis the ship's cargo of nickel ore and takes it. It's from his perspective that the action of the film is viewed and it is he who supplies the coda for the film which is the title for this review.
Passage to Marseille is not a bad film, but not up there with Casablanca.
