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.