The Brothers Warner hit on a good thing when they teamed up Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet in the "Maltese Falcon," and they've used the squad in varying combinations ever since, most recently in "Passage to Marseille." The latest vehicle ranks somewhere below the "Maltese Falcon," and on a par with "Across the Pacific."

"Passage to Marseille" spends too much time on the background material, the escape of a bunch of convicts from Devil's Island who want to fight on our team, and the plot is almost unwound before the film gets around to the actual passage to Marseille. We can't remember having heard the story before: it's about a French freighter carrying a valuable shipment of nickel, and also carrying fascists and democrats who struggle for control of the freight.

The skipper, an anti-fascist, picks up Bogart and his fellow fugitives in an open boat and they help him, after the line of narration has been broken up by flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks to give us an idea of what nice fellows the convicts were before they were sent to French Guiana. It looked like a justification to us.

Some of the executives in Warners' studio seem to be doing some pretty straight thinking about the war and about international politics; a lot straighter thinking, certainly, than Paramount's director, Sam Wood, who diluted "For Whom the Bell Tolls"; and straighter thinking, too, than the MPA (Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals--also called the Motion Picture Bund, the Brain Storm Bund, and others unprintable) which attacked Warners' "Mission to Moscow" as "Red" and "fourth term" propaganda.

The admirable anti-Darlan, anti-Vichy sentiments of "Passage to Marseille" are somewhat obscured by its overstyled presentation. Still, its statements even now are undoubtedly more explicit than most Holywood war pictures.

Despite some expository defects, "Passage to Marseille" is interesting and exciting stuff. And its political theme is inescapable: the struggle between the fascists and the democrats on board the freighter reflects the major struggle of the world at large.