Marie Galante

One of the very few Spencer Tracy Fox films that is available is Marie Galante. In it Spence plays an American agent working out of the Canal Zone in Panama and trying to stop a plot from blowing the canal up and incidentally trapping the American fleet as it is steaming through.

Complicating matters is Ketti Gallian playing the title role of the film. She's a French girl who gets picked up by a drunken sea captain and left ashore in Yucatan. She works her way down to the Panama Canal hoping to get a boat back to France, but she kind of blunders into the whole scheme of some master criminal to destroy the canal.

Of course her undocumented presence without passport in the Canal Zone arouses everyone's suspicions. Only Tracy has faith in her.

Marie Galante boasts the presence of Helen Morgan playing a variation on her Julie role from Show Boat. She's a drunken chanteuse and of course this too sadly reflected on her real life. She gets a couple of songs to do in her inimitable torch style, but nothing on the order of the hits Jerome Kern wrote for her.

The usual suspects in films like this are there, but this is not World War II yet and alliances have not been formed. Also the reason for blowing up the canal reflects a bit more on today's politics than in those of that era interestingly enough.

Marie Galante was an example of the kind of two fisted action parts that Spencer Tracy was doing over there with barely a stretch on his considerable talent. Still fans of Tracy will appreciate the film.

M. G. opens in a restaurant somewhere in France, with the sound of people singing. Then Marie Galante (K Gallian) on a bicycle rushing off somewhere.... Lots of people speaking French, and the ship captain gets a telegram in English, with lots of orders. The movie has been playing for two minutes and i'm already lost, although it might be my own fault for forgetting so much of my high school francais. It turns out the ship cast off while she was still aboard. More francais spoken. Then we're somewhere in central America, according to the title card, and we meet Dr. Crawbett (Spencer Tracy), Plosser the nightclub owner played by the great but sarcastic Ned Sparks (ya GOTTA see him in The Bride Walks Out 1936 - Hilarious!), spies, and various other suspicious people. According to Marie, (Ketti Gallian), she just wants to get back to her homeland. Crawbett and someone who MUST be a spy are sorting out the people in the nightclub, and that is the beginning of the story. Galante ends up going in search of a Frenchman who may or may not be able to help her get home. The screenplay and acting are quite competent, but the lighting is spotty and poor at times. When the camera pans around Marie Galante's room, it zooms past posters and things that would be helpful and interesting to be able to see. It appears Gallian's film career fizzled, while Tracy's bloomed and took off. Sharp viewers will also spot Sig Ruman, who plays Brogard. He had made A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera with the Marx Brothers. The spy plot and "foreign" locations (including the Panama Canal, whether or not we are really there...) make this an interesting, exotic story, while we try to figure out who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys.

The film begins with a French girl (Ketti Gallian) being accidentally taken aboard a ship and dropped in Central America. She is trying desperately to find her way back home and has only made it as far the Panama Canal when she falls into a plot to possibly blow up the canal. Officials think a man named "Reiner" is behind it but no one knows who this man is--and much of the film the viewer is left guessing.

Despite Spencer Tracy starring in this film, it is not a particularly distinguished film. Part of this is because it was made before Tracy went to MGM--when Twentieth-Century Fox was regularly putting him in very ordinary films. This one, despite a few good supporting character actors, sure looks like a B-movie--with an okay script and nothing to particularly distinguish it. As for Gallian's performance, it was not particularly good and after just a few more Hollywood films, her career would be over in the USA.

Note the Japanese agent in the film. He looked and sounded about as Japanese as Clark Gable!! Also, in another move towards creating an especially sensitive film(!), Steppin Fetchit has a small role as well.

As reported here, Marie Galante is a French girl working with the French telegram public agency who, after suffering several mishaps, "ends up singing in a café in the Panama Canal Zone". She soon gets involved in a plot to destroy the canal, a ship or a fleet. «Marie Galante» was based on a best-selling novel by Jacques Duval published in 1931, but when the screenwriters adapted it to cinema they "fumigated" the story and almost canonized Marie. In the original Marie Basilide is a poor girl from Bordeaux that is kidnapped and abandoned in Venezuela, and who finally arrives in Panama where she prostitutes to achieve her goal of returning home. It was a mixture of espionage and sex, and a reflection on French colonialism, referring to the Panama Canal. The movie is anything but that, maybe espionage and a little of prudish sex, but no more. Referring to the synopsis, what caught my attention most was the phrase "café in the Panama Canal Zone". Was this kind of place existent in the Canal Zone? I do not have the answer and I have no idea what the Zonians would do to have fun at night outside the barracks or homes in the military forts. I know that the city of Panamá once had fancy cabarets, where famous artists performed, where Evita Perón sang and where soldiers and marines used to go. But I never heard of cafes or bars strictly speaking within the militarized Canal Zone. In my youth, if I ever went to anything remotely similar, it was a big wood yacht club on the banks of the canal, where bands of American soldiers and Panamanians played rock and roll. In any case, returning to «Marie Galante», the film was not as successful as expected, though it is entertaining enough, and director Henry King maintained the interest with discretion, without becoming a "great espionage opus". Nevertheless, that did not prevent that a theatrical producer urged Deval to turn it into a musical the year the film was released. To that end, the producer hired none other than Kurt Weill, the master composer who collaborated with playwright Bertolt Brecht, and author of the song «Mack the Knife». But the frivolous Deval did not take the job seriously, he went to the United States to have fun and did not really adapt his novel to the stage, but directly transferred fragments of dialogue from the novel to the musical libretto, with many sets to make any set designer crazy, including a port with moving ships. The musical did not last a month in the theater. Efforts were made in 2009 to resurrect it and it was staged in Rome and New York. In the movies, the novel had better luck, when a new (unacredited) version was made by Fox in 1940, for the Charlie Chan series: the quite appreciable «Charlie Chan in Panama» in which Sidney Toler was by far more entertaining and astute than Spencer Tracy in «Marie Galante», as the investigator who uncovers a plot to destroy the Panama Canal.

MARIE GALANTE (Fox Films, 1934), directed by Henry King, stars Spencer Tracy in an espionage spy story set in Panama City. The title character does not go to Tracy but to Ketti Gallian, a French-born actress making her American movie debut. As much as Gallian acquires enough attention to make this movie her own, and her being the studio's answer to foreign-born imports as Greta Garbo (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) or Marlene Dietrich (Paramount), Gallian failed to make that impact with American audiences. Although she wasn't that bad in her galante performance, having the opportunity singing a French song "Un Peu, Bean Coup," and acquiring enough closeups, the material, based on the novel by Jacques DuVal, is mainly routine regardless of fine cast to back her up.

Opening on a seacoast town in France, Marie Galante (Ketti Gallian) is introduced as a messenger working for a telegraph office, bike riding her telegrams to assigned individuals. Delivering a telegram to a captain (Robert Gleckler) located in a cafe, he invites her over his ship, The Hettie King, to wait for a reply. Because of his drunkenness, the captain orders the steamship to leave port, naming Marie a stowaway and holding her prisoner in the brig below. Dropping her off at a seacoast in Central America, Marie, wanting nothing more than to get back to France, she is advised by an agent her only way home is to board a docked ship at the Panama Canal. Through the goodness of one man, she acquires a job working for the Pacific Gardens Cafe managed by Plosser (Ned Sparks). In the meantime, General Phillips (Arthur Byron), Governor of the Panama Canal Zone, holds a meeting with Ellsworth (Frank Darien) and Ratcliffe (Robert Lorraine) from England discussing on the capture of a notorious ringleader named Ryner (a master of disguises) with intentions on sabotaging the Panama Canal. Jim Crawbett (Spencer Tracy) from Wisconsin, an undercover agent posing as a doctor experimenting on tropical diseases, secretly handles the case. While at the cafe, Crawbett becomes interested in Marie Galante. He soon discovers her involvement with various characters promising to help her return home, feeling that maybe one of them could the man he's assigned to capture.

Members of the cast include Siegfried Rumann (Brogard, owner of the Parisian Bazaar); Jay C. Flippen (The Sailor) and Stepin Fetchit (The Waiter). Leslie Fenton is virtually unrecognizable as the Japanese General Tenoki, a dealer in curios; while Helen Morgan as Tapia sings a couple of unmemorable songs, "The Song of a Dreamer" and "It Serves Me Right for Treating You Wrong" Look fast for the uncredited J. Carroll Naish playing a French speaking painting sailor.

A real obscure item from Fox Studios that began to surface on public television in 1997, MARIE GALANTE might have remained forgotten in some dark film archive had it starred contract actors as Edmund Lowe or Warner Baxter in the Tracy part. Through the presence of two-time Academy Award winning actor Spencer Tracy shortly before his improved motion picture career for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1935-1955) took effect does MARIE GALANTE serve any interest to contemporary viewers. Of the very few Hollywood movies featuring Ketti Gallian, only SHALL WE DANCE (RKO Radio, 1937) starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (where she has a secondary role) is known to have numerous television broadcasts over the years. Though blonde in MARIE GALANTE, she was brunette in SHALL WE DANCE.

The plot material for MARIE GALANTE was reworked again in CHARLIE CHAN IN PANAMA (20th Century-Fox, 1940) starring Sidney Toler as Chan. While the original adaptation is a showcase for Ketti Gallian, who doesn't acquire all the attention during its full 88 minutes, other actors get to take part in this espionage story as well. Overlooking some slow spots, MARIE GALANTE rises above its limitations through numerous quick reaction shots from observers; dialogue spoken through the extreme loud noise of machinery in the Powerhouse; and some fine suspenseful moments. Availability for viewing on either video cassette, DVD, and on-demand from cable television's MGM Plus. (**1/2)