Reeling Backward: Dark Passage (1947)

A lesser film noir starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, notable for its use of first-person perspective camera work, that becomes less interesting as it goes on.

I’ve often said it’s better for a movie to begin weak and get stronger rather than the other way around. “Dark Passage,” the third film starring the real-life pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, starts out very interesting and engaging and gradually loses steam. Its last 20 minutes are borderline ridiculous.

The movie, written and directed by Delmer Daves based on a novel by David Goodis, is most remembered for its technique of using a first-person camera perspective for its first 40 minutes. We see the world through the eyes of Bogart’s character, Vincent Parry, who has been wrongly convicted for murdering his wife and escapes from San Quentin and sets about to prove his innocence.

The studio did not much very like this concept, partly because at the time Bogart was the biggest movie star in the world and they didn’t think audiences would take to hearing but not seeing him for the first third of the film. They also had supporting evidence in another noir, “The Lady in the Lake,” which came out earlier that year using the same technique. It bombed, deep-sixing the career of director/star Robert Montgomery.

Here, it’s the best thing about the film. Even though the big, clunky cameras of that era weren’t very nimble — movements like Vincent getting in and out of a car are painfully languid — it still works in terms of putting the audience right in the shoes of the protagonist as he flees the authorities.

Daves carries some of this aesthetic over to later scenes, such as a cop poking about a bus station while Vincent talk in the phone booth, mimicking the sense of paranoia it generates.

The switch comes when Vincent receives plastic surgery to conceal his features, which have been splashed across every newspaper front page in San Francisco and beyond. The camera steps outside to view Bogie with a huge swath of bandages covering his whole face. It’s only when these come off, perhaps another 30 minutes later, that Bogart is fully revealed.

The story is a typical convoluted crime narrative of the genre. It’s mostly chase-chase, as Vincent spends the bulk of his time on the lam from police or other nefarious actors who want to take advantage of his situation.

He leaves a lot of bodies in his wake, while somehow retaining the veneer of ‘the good guy,’ and it’s only in the last few minutes the real killer is revealed. This turns out to be an old flame of his, Madge Rapf (Agnes Moorehead), who is operating on the hoary old chestnut of, “If I can’t have him, nobody can.”

Vincent’s brilliant idea to turn her in to the authorities consists of typing up a confession based on his supposition of what really happened, then demanding she sign it. When she refuses, he seems completely bewildered as to what to do next. As a good guy, he can’t beat it out of her. She helps him out by flinging herself out of a window to her death — another murder charge to his name.

His one beacon of help in all this is Irene Jansen (Bacall), a wealthy young heiress to an architect’s fortune. She came to Vincent’s trial every day and wrote a letter to the editor in his defense, though she had no personal connection to him. Clearly she was smitten with him, and as it happens stumbles across him in the Bay Area countrywide, where she was doing some landscape painting.

Not only does she take him in and shield him — including a tense confrontation with police crossing the Golden Gate Bridge — Irene buys Vincent a fancy striped blue suit and gives him $1,000 (about 14 grand in today’s dollars) to make good his getaway. As it turns out, Irene has befriended Madge, who comes snooping around her apartment and grow suspicious.

Bogie and Bacall have some nice moments together. Vincent is puzzled that this beautiful young creature would take a shine to him, so he’s slow and humble to return any affection. The film ends with them meeting up in the seaside village of Paita in Peru, finally sharing an extravagant kiss.

It’s a somewhat morally ambiguous finale, as Vincent has no way to prove his innocence with Madge’s death, so he flees the country as a fugitive and convinces his life partner to later join him. It seems clear “The Shawshank Redemption” borrowed this with its final meeting in Zihuatanejo.

There are a lot of superfluous characters in “Dark Passage,” and in my mind it detracts from the storytelling. There’s Bob (Bruce Bennett), Irene’s erstwhile beau, who competes with Madge for who’s going to make the biggest pest of themselves. And George (Rory Mallinson), a trumpet player friend of Vincent’s, who’s killed off almost the moment he’s introduced — supposedly with his own instrument, which is supposed to be macabre but comes across as just laughable.

I feel similarly about Baker (Clifton Young), a minor-league crook who drives a 1920s Ford roadster with old carnival tent fabric as seat covers. It’s he who actually picks Vincent up right after he escapes from prison, and the two get into a fight when they overhear the announcement of his escape on the radio.

Baker turns up again later, having apparently tailed Vincent to Irene’s in San Fran, and puts two and two together. He pops up on Vincent with a snubnose pistol, offering him a choice of being shot dead so Baker can collect the $5,000 reward, or helping him secure a $60,000 bribe from Irene. They again tussle, and this time Baker’s defeat is more permanent.

Oddly, it’s Baker who gives Vincent advice on how to make his final escape, even giving him specific instructions on taking a bus to a town in Arizona where he can obtain false identification and pass through an open border. Such helpful extortionists they have in Frisco!

More engaging is the portion where Vincent gets his face surgery. A talkative cab driver, Sam (Tom D'Andrea), deduces who Vincent is but offer his assistance instead of turning him in. They wind up at the offices of Coley (Houseley Stevenson), a disgraced surgeon who gets a little soliloquy about the things he can change and the things he cannot.

There are mocked-up photos in the newspapers of what Vincent looked like before the surgery; it’s basically Bogart with a more square jaw and mustache. Dr. Coley also undertakes to make him look older, a nod to Bogie’s own aging process, which by his late 40s entailed a toupee and false teeth.

(He also had to wear ridiculous shoe lifts when starring opposite tall actresses like the 5’9” Bacall.)

I can still recommend “Dark Passage,” even though I think the last act stumbles to the point of falling down. Bogart plays an atypically passive figure here, much more a guy reacting to events than the one pulling the strings. There’s not as much of Bacall as I would’ve liked, and I think with anticipation of a movie that centers more on their strange romance, with the woman as the pursuer.

But we only get the movie there is, not the one we want.