Passage to Marseille

You'd expect more from this Warner Bros reteaming of the director and most of the cast from Casablanca, but lightning seldom strikes twice. Despite the efforts of the eminently watchable Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Claude Rains, the convoluted flashback plot (from an original by Mutiny on the Bounty's Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall) is tiresome and hard to follow. As the girl in the flashbacks (the Ingrid Bergman role), Michèle Morgan doesn't really register and Bogart is strangely cast as French journalist Matrac, leading an escape from a penal colony to join the French Resistance. But director Michael Curtiz does what he can, and he's aided by great camerawork from James Wong Howe and a superb score (as ever) by Max Steiner. As a morale booster, it hits the target; as a drama, it sparks only rarely.