by Allan Fish
(USA 1947 106m) DVD1/2
Hold Your Breath and Cross Your Fingers
p Jerry Wald d Delmer Daves w Delmer Daves novel David Goodis ph Sid Hickox ed David Weisbart m Franz Waxman art Charles H.Clarke
Humphrey Bogart (Vincent Parry), Lauren Bacall (Irene Jansen), Agnes Moorehead (Madge Rapf), Bruce Bennett (Bob), Douglas Kennedy (Det.Kennedy), Clifton Young (Baker), Houseley Stevenson (Dr Walter Coley), Tom d’Andrea (Sam, the cabby), Rory Mallinson (George Fellsinger), Mary Field (Aunt Mary), John Arledge (lonely man),
When discussing the films Bogie and Bacall made together, Dark Passage was, and to a degree still is, seen as ‘the other one’. Not The Big Sleep, not To Have and Have Not, not Key Largo, but the other one. The director had something to do with this, for while John Huston and Howard Hawks are accepted masters, Delmer Daves was not. He’s known today for the westerns he made in the mid-fifties, and 3:10 to Yuma is covered later in this piece. Yet Dark Passage still lingers, the ultimate deeply flawed film which has too much to be cast aside. Even the title makes one tingle.
Bogart played Vincent Parry, an escaped convict wrongly accused of murdering his wife and off to try and find out who did. He’s helped, seemingly for no reason, by Irene Jansen, who helps him past the police blocks and back to San Francisco where she puts him up for the night. Realising the danger he’s putting her in he decides to go, and encounters a philosophical taxi driver who ‘likes his face’ and decides to help him change it. The cabby takes him to a discredited but excellent plastic surgeon who changes his face. Vincent thinks he has a place to stay with his friend George, but when he gets there he finds him murdered, too, and is forced to go back to Irene’s. Time is running out if he hopes to find out who did murder his wife and George and clear his name.
One of the reasons it wasn’t popular at the time was undoubtedly the fact that Vincent doesn’t get justice. He gets a happy ending of sorts, but he’s still a fugitive as the murderer dies and he’s still the murderer in the eyes of the law. It’s an ending that feels false, like The Shawshank Redemption 47 years early. Indeed, the whole narrative seems like a series of scenes strung together, and less interested in Bogie’s fate than in observing the characters he meets along the way.
What most people remember, however, is the stunning use of subjective camera that is not only used for the first half an hour of the film, but is not merely a gimmick. It allows us to hear Bogie’s voice but not see him, so when the surgery is over, we know it’s his face we’re going to see. It’s a process rarely used because it can seem pretentious in the wrong hands, but it works remarkably well. Yet more startling still is just how much of it is shot out of the studio. While it’s true that quite a few noirs of the period were shot in the streets, they weren’t at Warners (compare it to The Big Sleep, shot by the same DP, almost entirely shot in a studio). Daves uses San Francisco and its legendary undulating topography. Indeed, Passage makes use of Frisco in a way even Vertigo didn’t match. There’s a real sense of the vertiginous streets with slopes like the Matterhorn, endless staircases that leave you feeling like you’re going to die.
And within this disorientation, the two stars are quite touching, Bacall with those legendary eyebrows like Van Gogh’s crows upside down, and Bogie smoking through a holder and drinking through a straw. Yet it’s the supports you remember. Bennett is an ultimate stooge, a complete waste of space, but he’s more than balanced by Stevenson as the old doctor, d’Andrea as the salt of the earth cabby and Young as the slimeball would-be blackmailer who gets his by the Golden Gate. Not to mention Moorehead, that ever vicious old termagant, getting her kicks through others’ misery. Yet even the uncredited bits are gems, as with dear Mary Field, the spinster aunt at the bus depot who’s given a reason to smile for once. There’s enough here to make any noir fan come over all tingly, but also enough to make one understand why, when writing of Daves, Andrew Sarris observed that “he doesn’t so much transcend his material as mingle with it.”
