Passage to Marseille

A French cargo ship finds five men in a small canoe in the Caribbean. They are convicts escaped from Devil's Island who want to return to France and fight the Germans. One of them, Matrac, was a journalist; he was sent there on a fabricated murder charge for what he wrote before the war. When news of France's surrender reaches the ship, the crew splits in two. Michael Curtiz builds the narrative out of three nested flashbacks, following the structure of the source novel. The choice makes the film hard to follow at times but opens Matrac's fall layer by layer. The cast is largely familiar from Casablanca: Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre working again with the same director. Who it's for: Viewers who like 1940s Hollywood war films, Bogart, and the Casablanca company. Who it's not for: The flashback structure is needlessly complicated and the propagandist tone is plain. One act of revenge is also harsh enough that it was argued about at the time.