Reeling Backward: "Les Maudits" ("The Damned," 1947)

This essay isn't about the better-known 1969 film by Luchino Visconti of the same title, but the 1947 drama by René Clément that was recently restored and given a lush Blu-ray release. "The Damned" concerns a group of German Nazis and sympathizers who flee the Fatherland aboard a submarine during the waning days of WWII, making for South America and salvation.

Ostensibly, they're on some sort of "mission" to sow support for the Wehrmacht and open a new front across the Atlantic. But with wives, mistresses and children in tow, and the senior Nazi leaders employing fake names, it's pretty clear their only real concern is the state of their own skins.

Visually, the film is bona fide masterpiece, with incredibly textured black-and-white photography by Henri Alekan that presaged much of the film noir look of American crime films of the 1940s and '50s. Alekan and Clément make terrific use of the tight claustrophobic spaces inside the sub, with all the characters seemingly having to hang on each other. All this really comes through excellently in the Blu-ray.

It's a little wobbly in terms of the narrative and characterizations, with some of the figures acting as mere collections of traits. For example, the French collaborator,  Couturier (Paul Bernard), only gets a few lines of dialogue here and there, so when he makes a desperate attempt to escape the submarine and is killed, his death carries little emotional weight.

Perhaps the most inscrutable character is the main one, a French doctor played by Henri Vidal. He's kidnapped from his coastal village when one of the important passengers suffers a serious head wound while the submarine is being pounded by depth charges. Since they can't bring her to a medical care facility, they bring the medicine to her. Once aboard, however, they can't exactly let him go and blab about their mission, so he gets to make the journey as well, ensconced in a storage room as a quasi-prisoner.

The never-named doctor acts as narrator and lens through which the audiences glimpses the "damned." He's not in open conflict with them, though he rightly suspects his life will end when his usefulness does. As a result, he purposefully concocts an epidemic of illness among the crew, which is clever if not very Hippocratic. There is a brief sequence about him trying to escape by using an inflatable raft stowed below the upper deck, but it doesn't go anywhere.

Seemingly in charge is a German general, who has arranged for his Italian mistress (Florence Marly) to be brought along with her industrialist husband, Garosi (Fosco Giachetti). Garosi knows he's a dupe and a cuckold, but soldiers on out of a sense of love lost and self-pity.

Like many of the characters, the Garosis are a mix of good and evil impulses that control them, with Mr. Garosi tending more toward the former and Mrs. Garosi more toward the latter. Even the doctor is somewhat morally ambiguous because of his willingness to inflict fake medical conditions upon his patients to save his own life. The only true innocent is Ingrid (Anne Campion), the teenage daughter of an intellectual, who later abandons her to make good his own escape.

The true locus of evil is Mr. Forster (Joe Dest), a senior SS party leader who bullies and threatens the others into following his lead, eventually even winning over the general. With his chunky black frame glasses and severe salt-and-pepper slickened hair, Forster comes across as a tyrannical engineer who treats people like wayward machines.

Most interestingly, Forster is accompanied by his "right-hand man," a young angelic-faced street hood named Willy Morus (Michel Auclair) who employs a switchblade or Luger pistol with equal skill. It soon becomes completely clear that Willy is Forster's homosexual plaything, who attends to all his needs, be they martial or intimate. At one point Forster is using his knowledge of the general's mistress as leverage during their power struggle, and the officer responds with a similar threat about Willy.

Willy himself is a rather morally shadowy figure, easily capable of murder at his boss' command, but also resentful of the way he's kept under Forster's thumb. Eventually he rebels and slays his lover/tormentor.

The ship of the damned eventually makes it to South America (no country is specified) to find that the war his over, Hitler is dead, and the submarine captain is ordered to return his ship to the nearest port and surrender. Instead, a revolt breaks out, the cargo ship that refueled them is torpedoed and most of the crew and passengers killed, with the doctor left aboard alone as the ship's ghost and chronicler.

I relished "Les Maudits" quite a bit -- it's truly a lost gem of its era, made less than two years after the end of the war. (And despite a few bits of canned footage used for some action scenes, the production values are generally quite splendid.) At a brisk 102 minutes, it's a rare film I actually wished was longer, so the characters and themes could be fleshed out more fully.

Reeling Backward: "Tokyo Joe" (1949)

I'm beginning to realize how much Hollywood reused story lines that had proved successful. "Casablanca" was a big hit, so that basic set-up -- Humphrey Bogart as a man of dubious loyalties in an exotic land, centered around a saloon, involved with nefarious dealings and a notorious woman -- was recycled several times. "To Have and Have Not" was an example previously covered in this space, and now I've stumbled across another: "Tokyo Joe."

This 1949 film with a B-movie feel is not widely remembered, and perhaps the reason is that it so closely resembles "Casablanca." The big difference is that instead of being an expat firmly rooted in his adopted homeland, Bogie plays a guy returning after a long absence. In other words, she doesn't walk into his gin joint, he walks into hers.

I should note that "Tokyo Joe" was not the movie I was expecting to see. I'd ordered it up in my Netflix queue along with a bunch of other World War II flicks -- those following the Reeling Backward column may have noticed the trend -- and I thought "Joe" was about an American pilot during the war. Joe Barrett was a pilot during the war, but the film is set in roughly the same year it came out, and Joe has long retired from military life.

He comes back to Tokyo to check on the status of the bar named after him, but not until being hassled by the American military. He's given only a 60-day visitor's pass. Joe arrives back at the bar to find it miraculously untouched by the many bombing raids, but not doing much business in the postwar funk that seems to grip the entire land. His friend Ito (Teru Shimada) is running the place, just getting by but better than most in Japan these days.

After refreshing their judo skills on each other -- in a rather painful-looking scene -- Joe and Ito have a discussion about the relationship between Japanese and Americans these days. Most Japanese feel guilty about having attacked Pearl Harbor, and shame at having been defeated by another power when their leaders told them they were invincible. The fact that the Americans have generally treated the Japanese well only feeds their shame.

Joe is astonished to learn that his wife Trina (Florence Marly), whom he thought dead, is still alive. He rushes over to her house, but finds her married to a British diplomat, Martin Landis (Alexander Knox). Joe abandoned her right before the war, and she divorced him in the interim. There's an interesting scene where the two men confront each other, and Joe tells Landis right out that he plans to win Trina back.

The romance between Joe and Trina is singularly unconvincing. Marly plays a Russian, with a not-terribly-good accent that sounds like a vaguely European lilt ... perhaps even, Swedish?

She has a blonde icy look and an impossibly tiny waist that made me ill every time I looked at it. Her confession to Landis that Joe holds a strange sexual power over her -- she doesn't use those exact words, but her description of wilting at the mere sight of him is enough -- is not borne out in her scenes with Joe, which are oddly flat.

In order to stay in Japan, Joe starts an air freight company with Japanese crime boss Baron Kimura, played by the great Sessue Hayakawa, as his secret partner. As near as Joe can figure out they're only hauling frozen bullfrogs, but it's not long before something more sinister turns up.

Joe later finds out he has a daughter with Trina, and Bogart's scenes with the girl are genuinely touching and a bit funny. Here's this hard-boiled guy -- Joe was prepared to resort to blackmail to force Trina back to him -- totally melting at a 7-year-old pixie.

The ending of "Tokyo Joe" is notable for its ambivalence. Joe is forced to choose between obeying the American military or Kimura, and appears to capitulate to Kimura, who is holding is daughter hostage. Things work out so that Joe saves the day, but is shot by Kimura and near death. As he's toted away on a stretcher, it's entirely uncertain if Joe will live, and if he does if Trina will choose him or Landis, and if the girl will ever find out her father's identity.

In an era when Hollywood loved cut-and-dry endings, "Tokyo Joe" is notable for the way Humphrey Bogart never steps fully into the light, or out of it.

2.5 stars out of four