Greenstreet/Lorre: Passage to Marseille (1944)

If last week’s Background to Danger was an attempt to recapture the magic of Casablanca, Passage to Marseille is an even more transparent effort to reunite the stars, the director, and the atmosphere of its iconic predecessor. Passage gets nearer to the mark, thanks especially to returning star Humphrey Bogart, though its labyrinthine structure plays a weird and distancing game with its audience.

Passage to Marseille begins with the journalist Manning (John Loder) interviewing Captain Freycinet (Claude Rains) about a Free French outpost in England. Freycinet tells Manning the incredible story of the naval voyage aboard the Ville de Nancy, where he was introduced to the garrison’s infamous gunner, Jean Matrac (Humphrey Bogart). There Matrac relays the strange way and his band (including Peter Lorre, Helmut Dantine, George Tobias, and Philip Dorn) made their way from the Devil’s Island into the service of the French air force. 

 

Passage to Marseille has become notable for its Inception-like plotting, which features a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. It’s evident that the film is an adaptation of a novel, where such narrative devices are commonplace, but in a film it’s a bit disorienting to be continually reminded that what we are seeing is actually just a story being told to one of the characters. Freycinet tells Manning about his first meeting with Matrac, at which time Matrac told him a story about being imprisoned on Devil’s Island, at which time the prisoners told each other the story of Matrac’s arrest. The film spirals ever backwards into history, with four separate timelines; none of it is too confusing, and as narrators go one could do a lot worse than Claude Rains, but it is peculiar to have to wait for nearly half the film to understand why we should care about most of the characters.

 

Fortunately, Bogart’s star power does much of the heavy lifting. The minute we see him, we too are eager to learn more about Matrac, this haunted and driven gunner. Bogart’s performance is clearly meant to emulate Rick Blaine of Casablanca, with his specific brand of morality driving him away from, then into, the Second World War. But there is something too of Fred C. Dobbs from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Jean Matrac, particularly in the Devil’s Island sequence where we see Matrac wrestle with his captors, false imprisonment and his own budding madness. As ever, Bogart is electrifying, though the film neuters itself by reminding us that we have already seen that Matrac will escape.

 

While sporting an eyepatch, Claude Rains does his usual Claude Rains thing, all elegance and precision. I was a little surprised to see the film not flash back to the loss of Freycinet’s eye, though Rains weaves it into the understated backstory of the character, treating it not as a handicap but as a welcome challenge to how he can continue to serve France. Among the rest of the cast, Lorre is a stand-out, though perhaps I’m biased. His Marius seems to be Matrac’s deputy, helping first to recruit Matrac in the escape attempt and then aiding him as he leads the other men to freedom. In the Ville de Nancy timeline, Marius is eager to speak for himself and his brothers, while simultaneously deferring to Matrac when he deigns to lift his voice. 

 

Relative to our purposes this month, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre are once again kept apart for nearly all of the film, though the rampant chemistry between Bogart and Lorre is on full delightful display. Where he stumbled as a Nazi in Background to Danger, Greenstreet is better cast as the martinet Major Duval, who relies solely on his own intuition and who wields respect like a bullwhip. Greenstreet and Lorre only have the one significant scene together, in which Duval’s interrogation precedes Freycinet’s more sympathetic dialogue, and it’s a fine centerpiece for Greenstreet to tell us plenty about Duval. As usual, in this sequence Lorre tells us more about Marius in the moments when he’s not speaking, but one cannot help – especially this month – wanting more, more, more.

 

Director Michael Curtiz, himself of Casablanca, went to great pains to reassemble as much of the magic from that film in Passage to Marseille. So much of the cast returns for this one, right down to a cameo from singer Corinna Mura. (Even Michèle Morgan, in her thankless role as Matrac’s wife, has a Casablanca connection – she screen-tested for the role that inevitably went to Ingrid Bergman after Warner Bros lowballed RKO for a release from her contract.) Between Curtiz’s directorial eye and the musical ear of Max Steiner, who bombards the film with refrains from the French national anthem La Marseillaise, the film’s every impulse seems to invite comparisons with Casablanca – short of thinly remaking the film, as was the wont of the Golden Age of cinema, it seems there was little more that anyone could have done to make this film more like Casablanca. 

 

You don’t need me to tell you, however, that Casablanca needs no remake. It’s cute to watch them try, and a film starring Bogart in his prime is never a misuse of one’s time, but Passage to Marseille is neither quite what it aims to be nor precisely what its audience expects of it. As the old saying goes, though, here’s looking at you – even a vanilla Golden Age war film is still worth a look.

 

Passage to Marseille is not rated. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Written by Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt. Based on the novel Sans Patrie by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Michèle Morgan, Claude Rains, Philip Dorn, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, George Tobias, and Helmut Dantine.

Monster March: The Invisible Man (1933)

Monster March gallops on with See-Thru Thursday, and The Invisible Man is something unique in the Universal Monsters pantheon. He’s not a creature or a supernatural being, nor does he have a lair, a costume, or even a particularly distinctive physical feature (aside, perhaps, from his bandages). What he does have on his side, however, is horror legend James Whale, a surprisingly nimble special effects crew, and a shockingly violent debut film.

Covered head to toe in bandages and overcoat, Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) takes up a room at the Lion’s Head tavern, where his innkeepers discover that their new lodger is actually an invisible man. Griffin flees, abandoning his scientific work to reverse his invisibility, and sets about seeking revenge instead – particularly on fellow scientist Arthur Kemp (William Harrigan).

 

The Invisible Man has the unique honor of being the fifth and final Universal Monsters film to be released before the Hays Code was enforced, beginning in 1934. (We’ll see next Friday whether the Hays Code had much effect on the first monster sequel, 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein.) Among its monstrous predecessors, The Invisible Man is by far the most violent. Frankenstein may have it beat for gruesome subject material, but The Invisible Man, while not overtly gory, is garish and unflinching in its brutality. Within the body of the film, Griffin bludgeons a policeman to death, derails a train, and murders a man by driving his car off a cliff – and all of this is shown in clear detail on the screen! Moreover, each sequence is scored by the gleeful laughter and grim humor of the titular Invisible Man, juxtaposing terror with sardonic cheer to brilliant horrific effect. Where each preceding monster had some redeeming quality about him, the Invisible Man revels in the violence he’s all too happy to wreak.

 

So very much of The Invisible Man works because of Claude Rains’s go-for-broke vocal performance. Selected for the role after Boris Karloff’s contractual pay fell through, Rains was evidently a favored choice for Whale because of his crisp delivery, and in terms of elocution Rains is a champion. More victorious, though, is the way Rains is able to fluctuate between cold rationality and mad misanthropy, hooting and cackling as he goes. It’s no wonder that Mark Hamill has admitted he drew a great deal of inspiration for his Joker voice, making this performance a bit of a Rosetta Stone for Hamill’s Batman work. Completely unseen until the literal final frame of the film, Rains is nevertheless commanding, compelling you to hang on his every word. It’s a shame, then, that Rains, like Lugosi, would never truly return to the role, though Rains enjoyed a much more extensive career in Hollywood than Lugosi ever did.

 

It’s a good thing Rains is so first-class as Dr. Griffin, because the rest of the cast is serviceable at best. Gloria Stuart has a role that amounts to an extended cameo as Griffin’s fiancée Flora, who nominally incites the action of the film by announcing her paramour’s disappearance but never fully selling her affection for him. William Harrigan, too, is largely indistinguishable as Arthur Kemp, to the point where I had legitimate difficulty picking him out of crowd scenes. Elsewhere in the film, Henry Travers puts in a memorable turn as Flora’s father, though I can’t be sure if he’s exceptional here or if I simply recognize (and will always love) him from It’s a Wonderful Life. If there is a scene-stealer in the bunch, it’s Una O’Connor, whose shrieking innkeeper is both hysteric and hysterical, hollering her way through the film’s first act. It’s certainly one of those performances that leaves you wanting more.

 

After Rains, though, the star of the film is its special effects team. Even by 2020 standards, the 1933 special effects are fairly stellar. Sure, you can see the seams and strings on a 4K television today, but nevertheless it’s effectively spooky to watch Griffin unravel his bandages to reveal the hollowness underneath. There are several sequences where one senses Whale and his crew are just showing off – as when Griffin removes his bandages and tucks himself into bed. It’s a scene that serves no real purpose in the plot other than to highlight the uncanny special effects of the day, but this sort of narrative indulgence, even in a film that’s a tight 71 minutes, can be pardoned because of how well it works. It’s all well and good to be told that Griffin is invisible, but seeing – or not seeing, as the case may be – is believing.

 

The Universal Monster movies are nominally horror films, though there is seldom anything truly horrific about them, particularly to a desensitized audience in 2021. There’s gothic drama in spades, suspense and chills, but is anyone truly terrified of Frankenstein’s monster or of vampires? (Van Helsing’s admonition, “there are such things,” notwithstanding.) Meanwhile, the Invisible Man is genuinely scary, preying on the visual nature of film to expose the purest terror in cinema – the terror of the unseen. “There is no terror in the bang,” Hitchcock famously said, “only in the anticipation of it.” Likewise, the true terror of The Invisible Man is in not seeing him, not knowing when this otherwise common murderer may wrap his unseen fingers around your throat. The only warning you’ll get is that velvety voice snapping into a snarl before your car plummets off a cliff – that’s the stuff, Bogart might say, nightmares are made of.

 

The Invisible Man is not rated. Directed by James Whale. Written by R.C. Sherriff. Based on the novel by H.G. Wells. Starring Claude Rains, Gloria Stuart, William Harrigan, Henry Travers, and Una O’Connor. 

Tune in tomorrow for Franken-Friday, with Frankenstein (1931) starring Boris Karloff and Colin Clive.

Next week for See-Thru Thursday, The Invisible Man Returns (1940), though he does and doesn’t, starring Vincent Price and Sir Cedric Hardwicke. But for bonus invisible shenanigans, Silly Sunday kicks off with Invisible Woman (1940), starring Virginia Bruce and John Barrymore.

Monster March: The Wolf Man (1941)

“Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night / May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” Half of the Universal Monsters had some sort of literary inspiration, but only The Wolf Man had his own rhyming couplet to sum up his tragic fate. It’s a clever little jingle that echoes through the film, haunting its protagonist – and the audience – until that moon shows itself and the curse manifests. Like the moon peeking out from behind the clouds, Lon Chaney Jr.’s debut as The Wolf Man proves that, after a decade of monster movies, Universal still had a few new tricks up its sleeve.

Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) returns home to Wales after the death of his brother, hoping to rekindle his relationship with his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains). Smitten with Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), who runs the antique store in town, Larry squires her and her friend to a traveling group of gypsies to have their fortunes read. When one of the women is attacked by a wolf-like creature, Larry rushes to her defense but is mauled in the process. Gradually he begins to fear that the creature was a werewolf – and now he’s under the transformative spell.

 

It’s interesting to think back and reflect that the bulk of the Universal Classic Monsters were all introduced within two years – and that The Wolf Man made his debut a full decade after Dracula kicked things off in 1931. (A sixth and final, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, would not emerge until 1954.) At a time when monster sequels were starting to run stale (I’m thinking especially of The Mummy’s Hand and The Invisible Woman, which immediately preceded The Wolf Man), the introduction of the werewolf into the pantheon of monsters almost revivifies the genre. Indeed, the presence of the Wolf Man ends up serving as a kind of backdoor pilot to bring all the monsters together for the “monster mash” sub-genre – but that’s a story for later on in Monster March. Suffice it to say, though, that the advent of the Wolf Man feels a bit like the final piece of the puzzle.

 

Lon Chaney Jr.’s performance as Larry Talbot is really quite remarkable among the Universal Monsters canon because it’s the first bit of acting that feels human. We’ve had campy caricatures and stock archetypes, but I’ve never gotten the vibe that any of the performances before 1941 were of real people with natural emotions. It sounds like a low threshold – and it is – but Chaney’s Talbot is imbued with genuine humanity. He’s compassionate with his loved ones (though his pick-up skills could use a little work), and he’s compellingly fearful when he believes his life is at stake. Moreover, he’s concerned for the fate of his soul, and he evinces a deep pathos when he assumes the burden of guilt for what he’s become. Larry Talbot is almost more interesting than the Wolf Man himself, which is a definite and welcome change of pace for the genre.

 

Having said that, though, this is a Wolf Man movie, and the sequences where Talbot goes wild are the stuff of gleeful popcorn matinees. Chaney mugs for the camera, sniffing and snorting, such that his Wolf Man is almost more dog man. It’s a far cry from what we’ll see next week in Werewolf of London, with a carefully groomed wolf man; there is very little sophisticated about Talbot as the Wolf Man. It is a shame that we don’t see more of the Wolf Man in this film, though I suppose it follows the old maxim of “leave them wanting more.” Indeed, one could imagine a version of this movie that doesn’t show the Wolf Man at all, leaving room for the possibility that Talbot is merely going mad, that his lycanthropy is all in his mind.

 

The rest of the cast is engaging enough, though very few of them get much of anything to do. Claude Rains is magnificent (and, unlike in tomorrow’s film, entirely visible) as Talbot’s father, though one wonders what he might have done with a meatier role in the vein of what Anthony Hopkins achieves in the comparable role in the 2010 remake. Evelyn Ankers is suitably shrieky in the role of the distressed damsel, but I confess that many of the other supporting players – Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Patrick Knowles – I would struggle to point out in a line-up. Instead, my focus was hypnotically drawn to Bela Lugosi, who I hadn’t expected to see in a werewolf movie (though his role as Ygor in a few Franken-films is delectably wolfish), and to Maria Ouspenskaya, who quietly steals the show with a gravitas-laden performance. I’m legitimately excited to see that Ouspenskaya will be back for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man – as if that title weren’t enough to augur good things!

 

Chaney said that he regarded Talbot as “my baby.” Considering how often Universal recast or outright replaced its monsters, it’s remarkable that Chaney stayed in the role for as long as he did – which is to say, permanently, never being supplanted as Talbot. With a debut as strong as The Wolf Man, though, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise. Larry Talbot might be vulnerable to silver, but this reviewer is a sucker for cinematic gold. 

 

The Wolf Man is not rated. Directed by George Waggner. Written by Curt Siodmak. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Evelyn Ankers, Patrick Knowles, Bela Lugosi, and Maria Ouspenskaya. 

Tune in tomorrow for See-Thru Thursday, with The Invisible Man (1933) starring Claude Rains.

Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, we’ll get a big dish of beef chow mein with Werewolf of London (1935), starring Henry Hull and Warner Oland.

 

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

We interrupt the impromptu tour through the movies of Martin Scorsese to bring you this golden oldie from 1938 - Errol Flynn in the vivaciously colorful The Adventures of Robin Hood. And now for something completely different...

Having previously enjoyed the 2010 Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe rendition of the Robin Hood legend, I retreated to the vaults for a helping of one of the earliest film versions and indeed perhaps the definitive one (aside from that Disney one with the foxes). In this one, swashbuckler Errol Flynn is the titular robber hero, battling the evil Prince John (Claude Rains, with the world's worst haircut) and his lackey Sir Guy of Gisborne (Basil Rathbone) for the freedom of England and the hand of the beautiful Maid Marion (Olivia de Havilland).

I'm aware that I have readers out there who enjoy reading reviews of movies definitively established as classics, and so I will try to overcome the challenge of saying something new regarding a movie about which so much has been said already. The Adventures of Robin Hood is regarded as the definitive Robin Hood story, the standard against which all others are to be measured (yes, even the Disney version, which seems to have borrowed liberally from this one). Modern first-time viewers may feel a strong sense of deja vu, then, because there's much in this film that's been deployed by subsequent entries in pop culture. The motif of the film smacks of V for Vendetta, such that I'm surprised the latter film's director chose to use The Count of Monte Cristo instead of this one for the protagonist's favorite movie. Robin Hood's escape from the gallows is reminiscent of a similar getaway employed by one Jack Sparrow in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. The green costume has become synonymous with Robin Hood, and the splitting-an-arrow trick has been used ad infinitum to indicate an archer's prowess.

Yet, remarkably, much about this movie feels fresh. Errol Flynn's vibrantly joyful performance is a welcome change-up from modern films, whose protagonists are often conflicted and bogged down by cultural ennui (I'm looking at you, Spotless Mind); thankfully, this Robin Hood is charming and confident in the rightness of his mission, unflinching in his devotion to his cause. More surprising are the rousing action scenes directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley; I've been bored before by action scenes that rely too heavily on quick cuts and special effects to grab an audience's attention, so imagine my surprise when the most entertaining action moments since The A-Team come retroactively, from a film more than 70 years old. These and other scenes in the film are entertaining beyond anticipation, with daring rescues and improvised ambushes takign up most of the movie's runtime.

And of course, the colors, Duke, the colors. (Anyone remember that ad?) The film is just gosh darn pretty. Though the colors are probably brutally anachronistic (I have a hard time believing Robin Hood had a pristine suit at all times while living in, of all places, a forest), they look astounding - particularly on the DVD, which is surprisingly cleaned up for such an old piece of work. Maid Marion's dresses quite literally sparkle, and there's not a band of the visual spectrum that goes unused here - the result being a visual spectacle that, if nothing else, gives your home entertainment system a workout.

But the standout feature of The Adventures of Robin Hood is the fact that it asks no heavy lifting from its audience: just sit back, relax, and enjoy the next hour and forty minutes. Good conquers over evil and has a good time doing it. The Adventures of Robin Hood, then, is pure, unadulterated, guilt- and angst-free fun, rousing escapism for all.
Finally rated in 2003 after being merely "Approved," The Adventures of Robin Hood now bears a PG rating "for adventure violence." I was actually surprised by the film's action; though there's very little blood, there is a surprising amount of arrow wounds and clubbings (most of which come off as comedic, even if that wasn't the initial intent). It's definitely more than appropriate, though.