Well... This begins with Free French flier Humphrey Bogart returning from a night mission and dropping a letter off for his wife Michele Morgan and son. Then - how did we get there? Base commander Claude Rains tells journalist John Loder (Now Voyager) all about it - how on board a ship crossing the Atlantic, populated by people like Sidney Greenstreet and Victor Francen (The Conspirators, Hold Back the Dawn, The Mask of Dimitrios), they pick up some escaped convicts, who in turn tell their story... They have escaped from the brutality of a French penal colony (I mean, we don't really see any Nazis in this, so it's interesting that the bad guys are French...) Our convicts are Humphrey Bogart (an outspoken journalist who's been shut up - again, by his fellow countrymen), Peter Lorre, George Tobias ('Petit'), Philip Dorn and Helmut Dantine, and they are aided by 'Grand-Père' Vladimir Sokoloff. Within this flashback there's another that tells Bogie and Morgan's story. Back on ship, Greenstreet wants to side with Vichy France and return the ship to Marseille (Bogie wants to go back to his wife) but captain Francen thinks England is a better idea and there's a (quite violent) mutiny. Then the quisling radio operator has told Germany where they are and they're attacked by air - Bogart comes over all wrathful here - manages to shoot them down, then machine guns the survivors - quite strong stuff for the time. Back to the present, Bogie returns from his mission but dies... Phew, what a lot going on, all in 105 minutes - Take note writers of eight part streaming series.
This elaborate script is by Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt (from a novel 'Men Without Country' by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, who also wrote 'Mutiny on the Bounty'). I was wondering if the story might be told more simply, chronologically, for example, but I'm actually not so sure it would have been any better. And the Bogart romance episode aside, that's also how the novel was structured.
Though high billed, Morgan is only in it for about two minutes. She hated Curtiz and the whole experience. Hal B. Wallis was the producer. Those countryside scenes are almost certainly the work of talented special effects guy Jack Cosgrove. James Wong Howe makes his usual strong impression behind camera. Max Steiner's score (orchestrated by Leonid Raab) isn't one of his strongest. Good editing from Casablanca's Owen Marks.
Interesting in that it's an exploration of French politics, but overall it doesn't quite work because of its cumbersome structure. American audiences were getting tired of war films, but the film made a profit through foreign sales (North Africa, for example, was flooded with American films following liberation).
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