1933: Female

Female (Michael Curtiz; William Dieterle; William Wellman; 1933) 7/10

During the pre-Code era of the early 1930's, Hollywood studios cultivated an array of fast-paced pictures drenched in sin, sex and vice. Depression-era audiences flocked to their local theatres to witness the latest taboo-pushing motion picture featuring hyper-sexual dames, gun-toting gangsters and the frenzied spectacle brought on by illicit drinking, prostitution, narcotic use and racketeering. The popularity of these tawdry tales kept Hollywood afloat during the Depression, but also brought the wrath of religious and state censorship boards.

One of the most daring and controversial pictures to emerge in this period was a sixty-minute film entitled Female: a novel work about the escapades of Allison Drake, a sexually vivacious female industrialist played by Ruth Chatterton. Having bequeathed her father's automobile plant through his will, Allison decides to run the plant herself. But Allison is not just a pretty face.

Punctual, efficient, intelligent and demanding, Allison expects her employees to follow her example of unrelenting professionalism and hard work. Adorned in masculinized attire and well-versed in the industry, Allison intimidates her male employees with her seemingly cold and unfeminine exterior, as she aggressively attempts to save her father's fledgling company. Unknown to the majority of her employees, she is not all work and no play. Her discreet invitations to conduct one-on-one business meetings at her spacious, art-deco home soon materialize to be far more sensual than professional affairs.

In these sequences Chatterton's character embodies the spirit of Catherine The Great. Like the famed Russian Czarina, Allison is equipped with both masculine gendered conceptions of leadership and a vigorous sexual appetite. In yearning to deal with men in a manner analogous to how men have treated women, Allison uses her power and seductive skills to utilize men less as 'household necessities' and more like pets. Her pillow strewn floor and crude electronic gadgetry enable her to entice men with vodka-fuelled sessions, before quickly dropping them from her roster the next day.

Marriage is not in the cards for Allison centrally because unlike many other women of her era, she is not financially dependent on men. Rather, her lurid affairs offer her the physical elements found in marriage through a brand of expedient satisfaction that is wholly without commitment. Repulsed by the willingness of men to believe sex equals love, Allison runs a crushingly swift program of elimination. When men do try to shower their affections upon her, Allison either ignores them or exiles them to other branches of her international empire. Allison even incorporates a system of salaried performance bonuses to pay for the additional 'labour' her male employees have exerted.

Subsequently, it was the combination of Allison's pre-marital affairs and willingness to compensate her workers for their sexual endeavours, which drew the ire of censors in the mid-Thirties and resulted in the picture being banned indefinitely until the Production Code's demise in the 1950's. Allison's liberalized sexual practices are performed without any regard for psychological burdens or notions of romance. The latter emerges in Female as a factor despised by the film's cynical and realistic protagonist, who shuns romance for its falsehoods and hyperbolic acts of flattery.

In one particularly striking scene, Allison ultimately shuns intercourse with a young artist, because of his repeated assertions of her divine status: proclaiming that she is "a goddess" basking in the heavenly atmosphere of her palatial estate with its church-like organ, extensive white walls and modern art statues.

The concept of duality and duplicity emerges as two key themes in Female. The film's repeated use of mirrors presents a concept of Allison having two sides: opposing personalities concurrently working in tandem. A masculine side is ever-present in the workplace as witnessed through her demanding demeanor and unisexual clothing. Although the masculine elements are present in the film's period ideals of sexual appetite, they are draped within sexually alluring female attire: seductive thin dresses and perfectly coiffured features.

The film's reversal of gender roles fizzles in the latter stages of Female when Allison becomes enchanted by the company's new engineer Jim Thorne (George Brent). Unlike her other male playthings, Jim is not interested in neither her money nor her sexuality. Preferring civilian work to animalistic hunting for sexual prey, Jim becomes the one entity, the omnipotent and predatory Allison cannot sink her claws into. Rather than relinquish Jim, Allison decides to win over him by playing the game: the marriage game that is.

Her subsequent actions in Female's final moments become an embarrassing farce in contrast to the film's overarching progressive ideals and sentiments. Regurgitating to a state of female stereotypes and clichés, Allison's sang froid interior cracks in a bevy of tear-soaked hysteria, yearnings to recede into a domesticated world and desires to leave the world of business to men. The closing onslaught of images including a bizarre, dreamlike picnic sequence border on the surreal. Like the memories of courtship in Alfred Hitchcock's I, Confess, this sequence in its unabashedly romantic flavour could possibly be ascertained as a mere dream, if it was not for the film's redundant finale in which Allison symbolically allows Jim to take the driver's seat in her luxury convertible.

Female was initially began by German emigre William Dieterle, who was replaced by William Wellman after the former fell ill. When Jack Warner disapproved of the actor playing one of Allison's early love interests in the film, the picture was then handed over to Michael Curtiz who, re-shot those scenes with a new actor Johnny Mack Brown and, ended up with final credit for the film. Bolstered by a brilliant, authentic lead performance by Ruth Chatterton alongside her then husband George Brent, Female still remains a feisty, groundbreaking film, which is only crippled by its regressive stance on gender in the film's closing scenes.

*Female is available on DVD exclusively through Warner Home Video's TCM Archives: Forbidden Hollywood Collection Vol. 2

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1944: Passage To Marseille

Passage To Marseille (Curtiz, 1944) 8/10

At Warner Brothers in the 1940's it was hardly uncommon for the studio to capitalize on successful films such as The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca by reuniting cast and crew members in future releases in an attempt to recapture the old magic. After the success of John Huston's 1941 Noir The Maltese Falcon, Warner Brothers mobilized Huston and the film's stars Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet and Mary Astor for 1942's wartime film Across The Pacific.

Following the unforeseen commercial success of 1942's Casablanca, Warner Brothers reunited director Michael Curtiz and several cast members including Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Claude Rains and Sidney Greenstreet to participate in a similar themed wartime film 1944's Passage To Marseille: an intricately structured film which synthesizes motifs and elements from Casablanca and Across the Pacific into a rousing action thriller.

Told within a multi-flashback narrative eloquently scripted by Casey Robinson and John and Jack Moffitt, Passage To Marseille concerns the plight of a Free French air squadron working alongside the British army in an attempt to liberate their homeland from Nazi tyranny. The film opens with Manning a British journalist (John Loder) who is secretly whisked off to a secret location in the southern English countryside by the War Office. Manning's job is to cover a story on the Free French fighters who are operating under clandestine conditions at the behest of liason officer Freycinet (Claude Rains).

Intrigued by the rugged face of nearby gunner Jean Matrac (Bogart) , Manning asks Freycinet to tell him about Matrac for his article. Thus, Freycinet recounts a story of how he came to meet Mantrac. Ordered to return from Southeast Asia at the outbreak of war, Freycinet boards a merchant ship along with a group of Petain supporting pro-fascist officers led by Duval (Sidney Greenstreet). While passing through the Atlantic, the ship comes across a canoe adrift in the ocean containing five starving men. Duval is convinced the men have escaped from France's penal institutions in French Guiana known as Devil's Island. But Freycinet, is unsure and begins to inquire into backgrounds of the men including Marius (Peter Lorre), Matrac (Bogart), Garou (Helmut Dantine) Renault (Philip Dorn) and Petit (George Tobias).

Unlike other films of the period, Passage To Marseille is not purely about men destroying the enemy, but the reasons why they fight. With its flashback-within-flashback structure, Passage To Marseille is essentially a character study focusing on themes of patriotism, honour, democracy and ethics. In many ways the film utilizes ideas already displayed in Casablanca and there are scenes which bare an uncanny resemblance such as Freycinet's stance at the airport and Matrac's country drive with his wife Paula (Michele Morgan).

But while Casablanca's Rick is an isolationist American hiding from a former lover in Morocco, Matrac is an embattled leftist journalist who was sent to Devil's Island under false charges by the fascist police. For Rick pragmatism makes good business sense; while for Matrac his idealism and devotion to France has waned: as the France he loves no longer exists. While Rick was jilted by Bergman's Ilsa, Matrac has been betrayed by his country and thus views fighting for it a fruitless task. Yet, as in Casablanca, one can find redemption and atonement for one's past sins through engaging in combat.

The crew of misfits and escapees Matrac belongs to hardly represents a pious and noble crew. Unlike Matrac, these men were vicious and seething prior to their penal exile on Devil's Island. Within their group, there are thieves, murderers and cowards: a rabble which does not impress the ship's strict disciplinarian guest Duval. But despite their past crimes, these men are also first and foremost patriotic and loyal Frenchmen: willing to sacrfice their lives in a bid to erase their past sins. For some this fight is simply to restore their honour after being deserters in the First World War; for others it is to metaphorically reclaim the soil stolen from them by corrupt governments.

This notion of loyalty also extends to the domestic front: demonstrated by Matrac's devotion to his wife and vice-versa through the obedient stream of letters he sends her. Yet, as in war films of the period such as Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel, we also see how sedition disguises itself in the form of Greenstreet's Major Duval. A man of purported duty and honour, Duval attempts to assert his authority on Captain Malo's (Victor Francen) vessel, despite the fact he has little actual power to do so. In Duval's regimentation and rash judgment, we see an adversary to the collective democracy espoused by Matrac earlier in his newspaper and in the convicts' system of democratic solidarity.

Shot by master cinematographer James Wong Howe, Passage To Marseille has a gorgeous sweaty and sinister feel to it. Using fluid tracking shots and expressionistic lighting, Wong Howe captures a mood of discontent and vitrol, particularly in the scenes shot at Devil's Island. Infused with articulate dialogue, the film's script while perhaps too verbally formalized rings with the passionate sentimentality, which endeared wartime audiences. While many critics have unfairly compared this Curtiz film with Casablanca, criticisms maligning the film's flashback structure are unfounded. Despite is complexity, Curtiz is able to rein in the various memories of the crew with dynamism. Although the film's special effects vary from awkward to superbly crafted, anyone who remembers the plane flying over Rick's Diner in Casablanca surely cannot proclaim that the footage in Passage to Marseille is anything but a vast improvement.

Similarly other critical rebukes of the film fall into this unfair comparison with Casablanca. Certainly French emigreé in exile Michele Morgan is no Ingrid Bergman, but the minimalist love story included in Passage to Marseille does not infer the same meaning as the relationship between Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca. While Casablanca is focused on a torn relationship to the backdrop of Vichy-occupied Morocco, Passage to Marseille is a film about comraderie and selflessness. The film's best moments of acting are often in quiet, throwaway segments: a bearded Lorre fidgeting in the background; or a lovestruck Bogart clutching Michele Morgan's hand. Thus, the internal intensity of Bogart's Matrac headlines the group's collective outlook, but does not define it. He is but one cog in a giant machine attempting to oust fascism from France.

Evidently, Curtiz's film stereotypes the French as an agrarian people, as noted by the scenes in which the air squadron harvests a field by day that converts into an air strip by night. But then again films like Hitchcock's Quebéc based I, Confess were continually promoting stereotypes of pious Catholic French identity well into the mid-50's as noted by Canadian historian Nicole Neatby in her article Taking Note Of Tourists.

What separates Passage To Marseille from films such as I, Confess and toward future conceptions of French identity is the dark cynicism in its denouément and aesthetic approach. Henri Clouzot would expand upon these in notions in Wages of Fear in his analysis of a world no longer bound by acts of patriotism, but internalized greed. Thus, Passage To Marseille is perhaps a final glimpse of those who were bound by nationalist duty to save and preserve a France, which as Mantrac observes no longer exists.

* Passage To Marseille is available on Warner Brothers Home Video in their Humphrey Bogart: Signature Collection V2

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque