Since the weeds in the back are getting really tall, I avoided pulling them by watching the 1944 film Passage to Marseille, or at least the last half, the other day.
The concept is a grand one: making a movie with the cast of Casablanca (1942). This was, is, and always will be, my favorite film.
And they include: Peter Lorre as Marius, Sidney Greenstreet as Major Duval, Claude Rains as Captain Freycinet, and Humphrey Bogart as Jean Matrac.
The premise is that a steamship picks up five men on a life raft. They are escapees from Devil’s Island who evidently want to repay the French government—for sending them to a place overrun with poisonous millipedes and tarantulas the size of catcher mitts and, just offshore, ravenous sharks who’ve acquired a French palate— by fighting for the Free French.
Bogart’s Matrac has, evidently, left his French accent behind back at the prison compound. Maybe a tarantula ate it.
It gets more complicated. On the steamship, we find Greenstreet (Rick’s rival nightclub owner in Casablanca), who turns out to be a hidden Nazi, and Greenstreet (also Gutman, the fat man in The Maltese Falcon), is not easy to hide. His diction, as usual, is impeccable. Not French, but impeccable.
Lorre plays a kind of craven fellow, as he did in both Falcon and Casablanca, who turns out in this film to be heroic.
Bogart, one of my favorite actors, sneers even more than he did in The Petrified Forest. I’m not sure, but I think that his character was sent to Devil’s Island because his haircut was an affront to the French nation.
Claude Rains is Claude Rains. He was allegedly a pain to work with, but his character, M. Le Capitaine (Renault’s rank in Casablanca), is from the Prefecture of Suavité et Drolleries. The man is incessantly classy.
Corinne Mura, from Casablanca, is also in Passage to Marseille. She plays a guitar-strumming nightclub singer in both films. She is brief.
Jay Silverheels is in this movie. Although he wasn’t in Casablanca, he played Tonto in The Lone Ranger, when he was denied the use of many parts of speech, including articles and prepositions and conjugated verbs.
I know I’m spoiled. I’ve grown accustomed to computer-generated special effects like those in “The Lord of the Rings,” where vast hordes of Orcs appear for the archer Legolas to shoot down so rapidly.”
The ship, meanwhile, is a wreck. It looks like a Canadian ice-fishing hut perched atop a box of Rice Krispies. I chose that metaphor because one of the Krispies—I‘m not sure if it’s Snap, Crackle or Pop—looks vaguely French.
And France is evidently located on the far side of a big tub of water on the Warner Brothers back lot. An ocean, it’s not. The camera fortunately just misses the fingertips of the technicians who are pushing the little boat around.
Anyway, a German bomber strafes the ship. I decided to name it the Madeline because I love those children’s books, by Ludwig Bemelmans, about the little girl in Paris.
During the strafing, the special-effects technicians are worked to the point of exhaustion in making reasonable-looking waves and bullet splashes in the Warner Brothers water tank. They must’ve gotten pruny fingers.
(I hope they drained that tank between movies. If not, Burbank would’ve been plagued by mosquitoes the size of German bombers.)
Meanwhile, other techs “flew” the airplane, the little wire almost invisible, probably getting dizzy and falling down because the plane circles for many strafing runs.
I know I’m spoiled. I’ve grown accustomed to computer-generated special effects like those in The Lord of the Rings, where vast hordes of Orcs appear for the archer Legolas to shoot down so rapidly, especially when he surfs down that staircase.
Alas, Lorre’s Marius dies shooting a clunky machine gun, a British Bren, at the airplane. Lorre was a marvelous actor—he might just be a match for Orlando Bloom—and a sensation as a child-killer in Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M.
He hated the Nazis and came to Hollywood.
(So did, among others, Casablanca’s Conrad Veidt, another Fritz Lang veteran, who played Major Strasser. Veidt loved golf. A heart attack claimed him at the Riviera Country Club, on the eighth hole, a difficult uphill par three masked by trees and guarded by sand traps. It’s a widow-maker.)
But Lorre and Veidt are to me, especially given the fraught times we live in, exemplary men.
Meanwhile, back on the Madeline: Bogart was firing another Bren at the German bomber. After replacing the ammunition drum and banging it with his hand, a trick he learned from the wife he fondly nicknamed “Sluggy,” he got the thing to work and brought down the airplane.
(Of course, Bogart later married Lauren Bacall. Here, we must pause: Sigh.)
Once the Madeline reaches France, many of the characters enlist in a Free French B-17 bomber unit. Bogart’s Matrac becomes a gunner and he expires as his shot-up airplane flies over the home of his wife and little boy.
That left Claude Rains intact. During Matrac’s military funeral, Rains reads the man’s last letter home. Matrac was terse in the rest of the film, but he had a lot to say in that letter. “The Marseillaise” plays in the background. Three or four verses.
The Warner Brothers technicians, worn out, were all taking naps by then.
So was I.
The weeds remain.