The most underrated of the Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall pairings has got to be Dark Passage. After the focus on the duo’s chemistry in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, Dark Passage was their first film together that was much less about their characters’ sexual tension. Instead, this film—based on the Dave Goodis novel—is more concerned with its murder mystery, leaving the Bogie/Bacall dynamic decidedly on the periphery. Despite it being an engaging film noir in its own right, the Delmer Daves-directed film is also a showcase of what, at the time, were some innovative filmmaking techniques.
Bogart’s Vincent Parry is a San Quentin escapee, but as with most of Bogart’s roles, he is by no means a morally bankrupt character. Falsely convicted of murdering his wife, Parry breaks out to avoid the death penalty and ultimately finds himself solving the mystery of who actually killed his wife and bringing them to justice, all while trying to hightail it out of San Francisco. While hitchhiking, and still in his prison clothes, he’s picked up by a sketchy-looking guy named Baker (Clifton Young). When a radio alert gives his flimsy story away, Parry knocks out Baker and steals his clothes. Before taking off with Baker’s car, though, the mysterious Irene Jansen (Bacall) shows up, addresses Parry by name and smuggles him into the city in the backseat of her car. With his face plastered all over the papers, Parry’s number one priority is a new, unrecognizable face.
The film’s central gimmick revolves around this plastic surgery. Daves’s major roadblock in shooting this first act was showing the pre- and post-op Parry. Bogart’s chiseled face is the stuff of legend, and it’s no easy task to find anyone who, even with the help of plastic surgery, might resemble him. The creative solution, then, was to employ a subjective camera—a technique that was still incredibly novel. Most notably, the Raymond Chandler adaptation Lady in the Lake was shot almost entirely from the protagonist’s point of view, to limited success. Daves has the benefit of incorporating this technique into a larger film, one that in most respects is shot traditionally. Parry’s perspective at first includes a lot of shaky running and shots of an arm moving branches out of the way or dragging Baker to the side of the road. The relative security of Jansen’s apartment marks the transition to more stable shots, frequently simple medium shots of Bacall. But in the midst of all this, Daves also includes wider establishing shots and thus isn’t restricting himself to that subjective POV.
Shooting the first 30 minutes of the film from Parry’s perspective, though, leaves Bacall to carry the bulk of the first act. That could pose a threat to the tenuous story, given the fact that her inexplicable character is more or less just a woman obsessed with a convict. She admits to following Parry’s murder trial religiously and believing he was not only innocent but slandered by the media. And she clearly raced over to the highway to pick up Parry when she heard about his escape on the radio. The only thing that’s missing is their prison love letters. But most of this is glossed over, and Bacall’s doe-eyed looks at Bogart harbor enough sincerity to set her oddities aside. This is still a step up from her woefully blank character in Key Largo. But Bacall deserves credit here because these early scenes that frequently require her to deliver lines directly to the camera draw out a steely resolve in her portrayal of Jansen. Without that to balance the final act’s romanticism, her character would surely be a vacuous love interest.
As for Bogart, once he finally enters the picture he looks a little worse for wear, which works perfectly for the broken Parry. When Parry was still in bandages recuperating in Jansen’s apartment, all Bogart had to perform with were his dark, dejected eyes, and— as ever—he really does sell the down-and-out character who musters the will to fight for justice. As the newly unveiled Parry, now going by Alan Linell, Bogart’s full performance highlights his loneliness and despair. He’s in unfamiliar skin; his suit is a little too clean, and he’s constantly looking over his shoulder. Knowing that he’s not actually a killer makes his later actions all the more uncharacteristic, from overpowering the blackmailing Baker, who has been following Parry from day one, to confronting Madge (Agnes Moorehead), the major witness against him at his trial.
Even as a pseudo-hero, Parry is an unwilling enforcer of justice, and that only emphasizes how much of his life has been a series of uncontrollable situations. Dark Passage is in no way an unproblematic film noir, although its twisting plot makes more sense than The Big Sleep. But tenuous character connections and gimmicks don’t negate the atmospherics Daves achieves. He uses San Francisco to his narrative benefit, exploiting the city’s rolling landscape of never-ending ups and downs and expertly frames Parry’s showdown with Baker under the Golden Gate Bridge. Dark Passage is certainly a lesser Bogie/Bacall vehicle, but, with that duo, even subpar work is essential viewing.
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