By John M. Whalen

You’re an escaped convict who’s just busted out of San Quentin. You get picked up on the road by a stranger who asks too many questions, and when he hears the guy on the radio say there’s been a bust out at the prison he puts two and two together. You tell him to stop the car and you slug him. You drag him into the bushes and another car comes along. It’s a beautiful woman named Irene Jansen who looks like Lauren Bacall and knows who you are and wants to help you. You go with her and hide out at her San Francisco apartment. But you know you’ve got to run or the cops’ll nab you. Irene buys you a fresh suit of clothes and gives you some dough, because for some crazy reason, she believes you’re innocent. You don’t remember her, but she was at your trial every day. After a few days you take off in the middle of the night and get picked up by a cab driver who just happens to know a good plastic surgeon and for a couple of hundred he fixes your face so nobody’ll know who you are. You go back to Irene/Bacall’s apartment wrapped up in gauze like the Mummy. After a week or two you take the bandages off and guess what? Now you look like Humphrey Bogart!

Such is the improbable and gimmicky plotline for “Dark Passage” (1947), the third feature film vehicle from Warner Bros. to star Betty and Bogie. And if that were all there were to it, it wouldn’t be much of a movie. But the flick is based on a novel by David Goodis, the poet laureate of Philadelphia noir, and in typical Goodis fashion, after Vincent Parry becomes Bogie, his troubles only multiply. He’s caught in a situation that seems to have no resolution. He was sent to San Quentin for murdering his wife. Of course, he’s innocent but the evidence was stacked against him. Now that he’s free, he wants to find out who did kill her and clear his name. Easy? Not on your life.

The plot involves a shrill harpy played by Agnes Moorehead, a friend of Irene who seems to get a kick of out of kicking people when they’re down-- when she isn’t annoying them. There’s the guy who first picked Parry up and got dumped in the bushes for his trouble. He shows up later as a blackmailer, because he knows about the plastic surgery. There’s a nice enough guy played by Bruce Bennet who was too nice to close the deal with Betty, and knows he’s got no chance with her now that Bogie’s around. There’s a tough cop at an all-night diner played by Douglas Kennedy who sizes Parry up as a man on the run and wants to take him downtown. It all spins round and round with Parry caught in a circumstantial whirlpool, dragging him down into oblivion.

“Dark Passage” came out the same year as Robert Montgomery’s “Lady in the Lake.” In that adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel, Montgomery filmed the entire movie using the camera as Philip Marlowe’s point of view. Everything is seen as though through Marlowe’s eyes. As if “Dark Passage” doesn’t have a gimmicky enough plot, Daves decided to really gimmick it up by following Montgomery’s example. He shot the entire first half of the film using a hand-held camera, one of the first of its kind. All the action in the first half of the film is from Parry’s eye-level view of things. Sid Hickox’s cinematography provides some great imagery, especially at the beginning, as Parry gets his first view of freedom from inside an empty oil drum. The scenes where Parry is in the chair facing a really creepy plastic surgeon (Housely Stevenson) and the subsequent nightmare he has about it later, are classic examples of film noir cinematography.