DARK PASSAGE (1947)
Directed by Delmer Davies
Warner Brothers, 106 minutes, Not-rated (Pre-ratings system)
★★★ ½
Dark Passage is a film noir offering that’s better regarded now than it was in its day. It stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, which you might assume would assure box office success. It might have been, had Bogart been more visible, but more on that in a moment.
Vincent Parry (Bogart) has just escaped from San Quentin, where he’s doing time for the murder of his wife. As he flees, he catches a ride with an affable man named Baker (Clifton Young), who is instantly suspicious of his passenger’s dirty clothing and soggy shoes. When a radio broadcast describes Parry–who we do not see–Parry knocks out Baker and desperately makes his way toward San Francisco. He catches a ride with Irene Jansen (Bacall), who knows exactly who Parry is but has followed his case and is convinced he is innocent. She helps him avoid a roadblock and takes him to her apartment, but Vincent won’t stay there until he is less recognizable, lest he put Irene in jeopardy. He sneaks out and is picked up by a cab driver (Tom D’Andrea), who also recognizes Parry but isn’t the sort to rat. In fact, he takes Parry to a plastic surgeon friend, Dr. Walter Cooley (Houseley Stevenson), who completely alters his looks. Parry hopes to hole up with an old friend, George Fellsinger (Rory Mallinson), but finds George has been murdered.
He this returns to Irene’s apartment to finish recuperating. Irene has her reasons for helping–her father was falsely convicted–but mainly she’s a sassy, independent gal with a sometimes boyfriend named Bob, who she is decidedly not in love with. Keeping Parry hidden from Bob (Bruce Bennett) or her prying neighbor Madge Raft (Agnes Morehead) takes some serious fancy maneuvering, though the prodnose Madge suspects something fishy is going on and Vincent needs to avoid her as she once came on to him, was rebuffed, and she ended up testifying against him at his murder trial.
Irene plays nursemaid and we only see Bogart for the first time when his bandages come off. Dark Passage evolves into a mouse and several cats drama. The plot thickens when, the on-the-loose Vincent is the prime suspect in Fellsinger’s murder. This becomes a meandering mystery in which not everyone is who they appear to be. Is Vincent really a murderer, or was he–as he claims–framed? Watch and learn.
At the time, Bogart was considered a real heartthrob which, in retrospect, made it a bad gamble to think that his name alone would compensate for not seeing his mug for the first third of the picture. Today, Dark Passage seems innovative for its point-of-view shots, but maybe that's also because not many people continue to think of Bogie as devastatingly handsome. In many ways, it’s Morehead who steals the picture. She plays the role of the woman you want to hate. She is nosy, acidic, duplicitous, and ten kinds of nasty. Bacall is, as always, quick with a quip and magnetic. By 1947, everyone knew that she and Bogart were an item–they married two years earlier–and this was the third film they made together. Still, those expecting a storied on-screen romance would have been disappointed by Dark Passage, which is a much grittier movie.
There are aspects of the film that don’t hold up well. Stevenson’s role as Dr. Coley played much better in 1946 than it does 75 years later, though I suspect that even then Coley came off as more of a mad scientist than a surgeon. Young and Bennett are rather wooden and, though Young does what he could with the character of Baker, the script did him no favors. But the black and white film stock does for San Francisco what it would do for Tijuana 11 years later in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. In both cases, it’s the shadows that matter more than the light.
I won’t claim that Dark Passage is pathbreaking film noir like the masterful Touch of Evil, but it is an underappreciated and lesser-known effort that deserves a new look. I’d say it’s Humphrey Bogart as you’ve never seen him before, but it would be wrong of me to stoop that low!
Rob Weir
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