Richie-67-485852 This fine cast makes the film come alive. Add dislike of the Nazis and love of country and you get an emotional movie making a point. What we forget is how many people died in that war and all the different stories that can be told none of them the same or alike but all unique. One wonders if the 50 million people who died of what difference their lives would have made if they lived. Dialog is good, acting on target and Directing holds up. I found it a little slow in the beginning but that is because I wanted to get to the convicts escaping part. The old man who sets up the escape has a story that tugs at your heart. Get snack, a tasty drink and.....

Hot 888 Mama . . . as all the Frenchmen except Sydney Greenstreet's Major Duval character seem hellbent on killing every Nazi or Hitler sympathizer they can get in their machine gun sights during PASSAGE TO MARSEILLE. (If Fox News were around in 1944, I'm sure they would deride this flick for NOT being fair and balanced, no doubt labeling it a ploy of the liberal media and pinko Hollywood designed to win support for Russians and other enemies of capitalism.) While it is true that the one thing Nazi forces do in MARSEILLE that gets under everyone's skin is strafing the freighter full of nickel ore that Humphrey Bogart's Jean Matrac character and his comrades are defending (resulting in Bogie machine gunning the surrendering plane crew minutes AFTER he's brought down their aircraft), the Nazi approach here seems counter-productive. Major Duval and his ship's radio officer henchman had informed the German high command that the freighter carried raw materials vital to the Nazi war effort, so why in the heck would they try to sink this ship?

Casablanca3784 I suppose Warner Brothers was trying to make hay out of "Casablanca" which, in 1944 when "Passage" was filmed was still very far from becoming one of, if not the greatest American film;I say it was. Yes, as I viewed it thanks to Mr. Turner, I did feel a bit "Casablankish" but it was merely spotty, illusory but not serious. In no way can "Passage" compare to "Blanca" yet I found it, although a bit corny at times, quite entertaining. Bogart's cynicism, the linchpin of "Blanca" is quite obvious because his main duty was to get back to France to see Michèle Morgan rather than to fight Nazism while the rest of his fellow escapees from Devil's Island were true blue patriots. Vive la France and so on and so forth. Bogart, on the other hand, was framed by his "beloved" France which resulted in his sweating out the brutality of French Guyana in all its splendor. Although missing the incredible Ingrid Bergman, this film does offer some of the "Blanca Boys" such as Peter Lorre and Claude Rains. By the way, even though Lorre was an odd looking little guy, in real life he was one of Bogie's best friends thanks to his boozing and then losing money in card games.Some of the battle action at sea is interesting but as phony as phony can be--it's quite obvious those scenes were shot in a gigantic bath tub on the Warner lot.Incidentally if a reader hasn't visited Hollywood and taken a tour or two through the studios,allow me to tell you this as my wife and I were aboard a tram touring Universal Studios. Those wartime battle scenes at sea were actually shot using miniature ships and planes sailing in and hovering over large barrels of water.All in all, "Passage" could never be rated, at least by me, as BAD just by virtue of Humphrey Bogart's starring role. The guy didn't become an icon for doing nothing.

gpeevers One of several attempts to recapture the magic of Casablanca, Passage to Marseille brings back a number of the principals but fails to live up to its potential.We begin with a journalist's visit to a Free French air base in Britain during the Second World War from which we flash back to story of Matrac (Humphrey Bogart) a gunner on one of the bombers about leave on a mission and how he came to be there. The French officer being interviewed by the journalist is played by Claude Rains and the flashback introduces both Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Also returning from Casablanca is the somewhat overlooked but remarkably successful director Michael Curtiz.The biggest deficiency appears to be the story. The flashback within a flashback structure may not be entirely to blame but the fact we know the outcome to most of the important questions before hand definitely dilutes the tension of the picture. The characters lack sufficient or appropriate motivation in several cases and others do not seem to earn the redemption it appears we are meant to feel for them, Bogart's character gets better treatment but the setup for his background is rather perfunctory.In terms of strengths it is certainly enjoyable to see such performers as Bogart, Rains, Greenstreet and Lorre, even if their talents are not adequately used and the roles are lacking. Also not surprisingly the visuals are impressive thanks likely both to cinematographer James Wong Howe and director Michael Curtiz.The viewpoints of the characters are also interesting in that this film was made during the war, not surprisingly we get a rather uncompromising view of collaborators but we also get a fairly frank depiction of the brutalities of war on behalf of the allies.This serves as good illustration about how remarkable a film like Casablanca was, with many of the same principals and a story with a number of parallels we get an entirely different result.