“John Weber, an American producer, had asked him to work on a film in Italy. The screenplay, drawn from a novel by a French Jewish writer, Noël Calef, was ready. It had been written by Ben Barzman, the author of The Boy with Green Hair […]. The location shooting brought Losey, who was in Italy for the first time (“In my travels throughout Europe before the war, I had always refused to go to Italy, maybe mistakenly; however, it was a matter of principle, due to Mussolini”), to the area between Pisa and Livorno: the Tirrenia studios of the Forzanos, the leading studios of Fascist cinema, now trying to make a comeback under the protective wings of the new Republican government. Oddly, contact with the Forzanos had been made through people Losey called “my American Communist friends”, and production was carried out under two wings, the Communist wing and the still staunchly Fascist wing. […]

The final irony was that the film, since its real director’s name was unmentionable, was signed by Andrea, old Forzano’s son, so uninterested in the endeavour that, as Losey recalls, he never showed up on the set. […]. The nameless director took up, so to speak, where he left off. Like The Big Night, his first film in exile is cast as the story, from morning to midnight, of a father-and-son relationship. Although here the relation between the two is not of kin, but of a chance despair, the link is made by an (involuntary) sense of guilt exchanged between the two. Out of fear the child steals a bottle of milk; out of hunger the man strangles the shopkeeper, and behind these actions we see lurking, in the Brechtian detachment which suppresses any pathetic implications, the same innocence of the weak, which for Losey the Communist is an unquestionable tenet during this period: “I have a right to eat, a right to live” (later, in the sombre masterpieces of his maturity, would come the contamination and tortuous alienation of every relationship, both personal and class-based).

Just as, partly in The Boy with Green Hair, fully in The Lawless, and necessarily in the remake of M, Imbarco a mezzanotte is a film about fugitives. If the boy with green hair and the Indios in The Lawless were driven to take flight by intolerance and racism, here the man is forced to flee the poverty of post-war Italy. Losey, a stowaway fugitive himself, having landed in Tirrenia’s sets in Tuscany, is in his turn overcome by the “wondrous and cumbersome” landscapes of an as yet unreconstructed, unreconciled Italy – by the wondrous and cumbersome memory of its recent, glorious cinema, by now already on the wane. (Paola Cristalli, Note su Imbarco a mezzanotte, Cinegrafie, n. 12, 1999)