Passage to Marseille

Something of a follow-up to Casablanca, but without that movie's deft and evocative script. Bogart plays Jean Matrac, a journalist converted, by a confrontation at sea with Greenstreet's elegant fascism (shades of Huston's Across the Pacific), from bitterness against a France that has wronged him to self-destructive patriotism with the Free French. The movie is brought to earth by its unnecessary complexity - at one point we're in a flashback from a flashback from a flashback - but the central scenes on Devil's Island have a cogency and atmosphere, particularly Bogart's spell in solitary, which demonstrate the movie it might have been. The last reel quivers with the sort of emotionalism that wartime audiences adored. Bogart hasn't much to do beyond gritting his teeth, Rains typically holds the plot together, and Michèle Morgan is thanklessly cast as the wife waiting at home 'till we meet again'.