I watched “Passage to Marseille,” dir. Michael Curtiz (Warner Bros., 1944), this evening.

I forgot about the shocking scene in which Humphrey Bogart’s character machine-guns the surviving crew of the German plane he’d just downed at sea. The audience in 1944 was meant to sympathize with this act. After all, that crew had just tried to bomb the small civilian freighter. I don’t know if such a scene would have worked in a Hollywood film much earlier, but it did in 1944. Was this fictional atrocity an indication of American popular culture’s brutalization in World War II?

Black and white image of movie release poster, landscape orientation, shows heads of all the movies' stars.

Movie poster image source: “Warner Bros. Pressbook” (1944), Internet Archive.