Along with Jim Thompson, David Goodis stood in that second tier of hard-boiled writers whose work would generate several titles in the noir cycle and its aftermath: The Unfaithful, Nightfall, The Burglar, Street of No Return, and Dark Passage. In this last, Delmer Daves wrote the passably tight script (a few holes remain undarned), which he then directed, resulting in one of the more memorable San Francisco noirs.
We open on an oil barrel teetering around on the back of a truck. A pair of hands on the rim (from within) indicate that its occupant is trying to dislodge his container from its berth, which he does, as well he might, as he's an escapee from San Quentin, in for murdering his wife three years ago. We know from the iconic voice, with its wisp of an impediment, that it's Humphrey Bogart, but we don't get a glimpse of him for quite a while. Fired up by the dubious "subjective camera" technique of the Robert Montgomery's recently released The Lady in the Lake, Daves, too, casts the camera as his main character's eyes. Luckily, he's inconsistent in using this conceit, and once Bogart gets a face job, that's the end of it, and not a second too soon.
After hitching a ride with too inquisitive a driver (Clifton Young), whom he pummels into silence, Bogart is picked up by Lauren Bacall, who seems to know all about him and whisks him back to her moderne two-floor apartment in the city (the lighted elevator glides up and down a glass-brick column; the building, by the way, still stands). Bacall took an interest in his case since her own father was wrongly executed for murder (in the newspaper clipping she keeps, Daves' photograph does service for Dad). What's more, she travels in the same ritzy circles as did Bogart and his defunct wife, and do viperish Agnes Moorehead and coveted man-about-the-town Bruce Bennett.
Bacall sequesters Bogart as long as she can in her more than comfortable digs, what with a well-stocked liquor cabinet, home-cooked dinners by candlelight and Jo Stafford styling torchy numbers from the radio. But comes the time when Bogart must exchange his mug for a less recognizable one, and the movie must go down the mean streets of film noir. Young's distinctive convertible jalopy parked outside is the first clue that's something's amiss, but Bogart takes heart from good-hearted cabbie Tom D'Andrea, who not only drives him to the spartan rooms of his best friend, a jazz trumpeter (Rory Mallinson), but who just happens to know an unlicensed sawbones who specializes in $200 plastic surgeries. Bogart plans to stay with Mallinson for his week of recuperation, but finds him dead, bludgeoned with his own trumpet. Bandaged up like The Invisible Man, he makes his way back to Bacall's layout, determined to smoke out his wife's killer....
Despite jumping rather impulsively from one plot strand to the next, Dark Passage keeps up a not-so-slack pulse of tension. Daves works up a few evocative and suggestive sequences. Houseley Stevenson delivers toothsome little character study (sinister? Benevolent?) of the back-alley surgeon, and when Bogart strikes out on his own, wanting little more than eggs-over-easy at a diner, he's spotted by a police detective who comes on like a Gestapo agent it's a neat way of expressing the vulnerability that Bogart thinks even his new visage can't disguise.
Dark Passage is far from flawless. In their third major screen pairing (Two Guys From Milwaukee is best overlooked), off-screen couple Bogart and Bacall fail to generate the playful erotic spark that Howard Hawks coaxed out of them in To Have And Have Not and The Big Sleep; granted, Dark Passage is plenty shy of playfulness. Worse, the various strands of the story often come across as episodic, unconnected; Daves (or Goodis) doesn't weave the tenuous but tough web of murky connections that a Raymond Chandler could. Still, as one of Daves' better efforts, it still holds up and it's fascinating to watch that elevator slide up and down its crystal sheath.
We open on an oil barrel teetering around on the back of a truck. A pair of hands on the rim (from within) indicate that its occupant is trying to dislodge his container from its berth, which he does, as well he might, as he's an escapee from San Quentin, in for murdering his wife three years ago. We know from the iconic voice, with its wisp of an impediment, that it's Humphrey Bogart, but we don't get a glimpse of him for quite a while. Fired up by the dubious "subjective camera" technique of the Robert Montgomery's recently released The Lady in the Lake, Daves, too, casts the camera as his main character's eyes. Luckily, he's inconsistent in using this conceit, and once Bogart gets a face job, that's the end of it, and not a second too soon.
After hitching a ride with too inquisitive a driver (Clifton Young), whom he pummels into silence, Bogart is picked up by Lauren Bacall, who seems to know all about him and whisks him back to her moderne two-floor apartment in the city (the lighted elevator glides up and down a glass-brick column; the building, by the way, still stands). Bacall took an interest in his case since her own father was wrongly executed for murder (in the newspaper clipping she keeps, Daves' photograph does service for Dad). What's more, she travels in the same ritzy circles as did Bogart and his defunct wife, and do viperish Agnes Moorehead and coveted man-about-the-town Bruce Bennett.
Bacall sequesters Bogart as long as she can in her more than comfortable digs, what with a well-stocked liquor cabinet, home-cooked dinners by candlelight and Jo Stafford styling torchy numbers from the radio. But comes the time when Bogart must exchange his mug for a less recognizable one, and the movie must go down the mean streets of film noir. Young's distinctive convertible jalopy parked outside is the first clue that's something's amiss, but Bogart takes heart from good-hearted cabbie Tom D'Andrea, who not only drives him to the spartan rooms of his best friend, a jazz trumpeter (Rory Mallinson), but who just happens to know an unlicensed sawbones who specializes in $200 plastic surgeries. Bogart plans to stay with Mallinson for his week of recuperation, but finds him dead, bludgeoned with his own trumpet. Bandaged up like The Invisible Man, he makes his way back to Bacall's layout, determined to smoke out his wife's killer....
Despite jumping rather impulsively from one plot strand to the next, Dark Passage keeps up a not-so-slack pulse of tension. Daves works up a few evocative and suggestive sequences. Houseley Stevenson delivers toothsome little character study (sinister? Benevolent?) of the back-alley surgeon, and when Bogart strikes out on his own, wanting little more than eggs-over-easy at a diner, he's spotted by a police detective who comes on like a Gestapo agent it's a neat way of expressing the vulnerability that Bogart thinks even his new visage can't disguise.
Dark Passage is far from flawless. In their third major screen pairing (Two Guys From Milwaukee is best overlooked), off-screen couple Bogart and Bacall fail to generate the playful erotic spark that Howard Hawks coaxed out of them in To Have And Have Not and The Big Sleep; granted, Dark Passage is plenty shy of playfulness. Worse, the various strands of the story often come across as episodic, unconnected; Daves (or Goodis) doesn't weave the tenuous but tough web of murky connections that a Raymond Chandler could. Still, as one of Daves' better efforts, it still holds up and it's fascinating to watch that elevator slide up and down its crystal sheath.