WARNING: SPOILERS

Does “Passage to Marseille” hold the record for flashbacks? By the middle of the movie, we’re watching one man, Capt. Freycinet (Claude Rains), tell a story in which another man, Renault (Philip Dorn), tells him the story of a prison break, during which Renault again tells a third man the story of a fourth man, who is Matrac (Humphrey Bogart), our ostensible hero.

I was half hoping, like plate-spinners on “Ed Sullivan,” they would keep it going until we lost the thread completely. Or until we landed on something interesting.

Yeah, it’s not a good movie. It has half the cast of “Casablanca” but it’s about a thousand miles from “Casablanca.”

It begins contemporary, 1943 or ’44, as Capt. Freycinet, a leader in the Free French Air Squadron, shows a reporter, Manning (John Loder), their undercover operation: how planes and hangars are hidden amid haystacks and cows in the serene English countryside. Manning is impressed. Particularly by one pilot, Matrac. What’s his story? 

“To begin with,“ Freycinet says, ”I’ll have to take you far away from here…”

Lambasting Daladier
That’s how we wind up in the middle of the Atlantic, aboard a ship, Ville de Nancy, bound for Marseille with a cargo of nickel ore. I’m guessing it’s spring 1940—after the war has started but before the fall of France. The ship then chances upon a small canoe with starving, half-dead men inside. Maj. Duval (Sydney Greenstreet) says with assurance they’re escapees from Devil’s Island, but we’d already heard him say with assurance that the Maginot Line is invincible, so we know what his opinion is worth. Except this time he’s right. The men admit as much to Freycinet. But they have a cause: They’re on their way back to fight for France. Like free men! And that's when Renault tells Freycinet their story.

Now we’re on Devil’s Island, nine miles off the coast of French Guiana, and the men are doing backbreaking labor in the heat and the swamps and the mosquitos. These men are:

• Renault, our narrator, who turned coward during battle and wants to redeem himself
• Petit (George Tobias), a hefty farmer with serious guns and a serious hatred of Germans
• Marius (Peter Lorre), playing trying-to-fit-in Peter Lorre
• Garou (Helmut Dantine), young, handsome, idealistic

They become friends with Grandpere (Vladimir Sokoloff), a former prisoner who makes a living collecting and selling butterflies. He wants to use the money to escape, but he's told they need one more man, Matrac, currently in solitary confinement. Who’s Matrac? Grandpere asks. Is he a patriot?

Is he a patriot!?! 

And that’s when we flash back yet again. (At this point, I would’ve loved a cut to Manning, perplexed, saying, “Wait, who’s talking?”)

So in 1938, Matrac, wearing the traditional Bogie fedora, is a crusading publisher lambasting Edouard Daladier over the Munich Accords with a J’Accuse! headline. For that, a mob of—I guess—pro-appeasers descends on his newspaper and destroys it. At this point, Matrac takes the stenographer/obvious love interest Paula (Michele Morgan of “Le Quai des Brumes”) and heads to the French countryside, where they get married. Ah, but during an idyllic shopping excursion she sees a headline—Matrac is wanted for murder! It’s a trumped-up charge, led again by pro-Daladier forces, but now they’re on the lam. And now he’s caught and sentenced to 15 years on Devil’s Island.

And that’s why we need Matrac, Renault tells Grandpere. (Or Freycinet tells Manning that Renault told him that he told Grandpere.)

The escape from prison is relatively easy, as escapes go—shadows on the wall—but at the beach they find the boat is smaller than expected and can’t support their weight. Someone will have to stay behind. The man who initiated everything, Grandpere, winds up volunteering, reasoning that he’s old, and these other men are young and can fight. But he asks them to swear an oath on it. They do … save for Matrac, in back, silent and gloomy. Maybe he's not such a patriot after all? Maybe he’s cynical like Rick and sticks his neck out for nobody? Yeah, that’s the feeling they’re going for. Or trying to.

So now, only one flashback removed from our start, all we need is the reason why Matrac goes from holding a grudge against France to fighting for her with all his heart.

You can thank Sidney Greenstreet. Once word reaches the ship that France has fallen, Capt. Malo (Victor Francen) alters course for England. So Maj. Duval, an opportunist and maybe closet fascist, takes over the ship. On deck, guns trained, he offers this realpolitik benediction: “Men, a new order has been born in Europe. France has been given the privilege of being a part of it.”

Especially the criminals, he adds. You’ll all be exonerated. For a moment Matrac looks like he’s considering the offer. But then the cabin boy, who admires Matrac beyond all reason, shouts “Vive le France!” and is decked by one of the mutineers. So Matrac decks that guy. Now it’s a melee. And now they retake the ship. But a German bomber gets their coordinates and makes one pass, two passes. On the third, Matrac shoots it down. Marius dies, but he dies a free man, while Matrac, to the astonishment of the captain, shoots the surviving Germans in cold blood.

Then the cabin boy dies, admiring Matrac unequivocably, as everyone does.

Too tragic
As mentioned, “Passage to Marseille” reunites much of the cast from “Casablanca”—not just Bogie, Rains, Lorre and Greenstreet, but Helmet Dantine, the handsome prisoner who, in “Casablanca,” was the handsome husband Rick lets win at roulette, as well as guitarist/singer Corinna Muna, who sang at Rick’s. And that’s just cast. The director is the same (Michael Curtiz), one of the writers (Casey Robinson), Max Steiner, etc.

Doesn’t work. Apparently they were originally thinking Jean Gabin (in exile in Hollywood) for the lead. I could see that. Not that he's bad, but Bogie’s a bit American for all this.

As for where they are now? Or in 1944? Garou is the air force’s best mechanic, Petit a tireless member of our groundcrew, while Renault, his cowardice long past, is pilot of the plane Matrac is on—in the midst of a bombing raid over Germany. It’s Matrac's five-year-old boy’s birthday, a boy he’s never met, even if his bombers occasionally divert over the town of Romilly to drop a message. That’s the plan for this evening but all the other bombers return except for V for Victor. No, wait, there it is! Renault lands the wounded airplane. And Matrac? More than wounded.

“He got two Messerschmidts. He didn’t get the third one.”

And then the movie just keeps going. 

But maybe good. At Matrac’s cliffside burial site, all the men gathered somberly, Freycinet reads the long letter Matrac had written for his boy but never got a chance to deliver; and it includes these lines about the men he fought with:

Their deadly conflict was waged to decide your future. … My son, be the standard bearer of a great age they have made possible. Because it would be too tragic if men of good will should ever be lax or fail again to build a world where youth may love without fear, where parents may grow old with their children, and where men may be worthy of each other’s faith.

Yes, it would be too tragic.