Review of Dark Passage

The first two movies teaming Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were based on novels by heavyweight authors Ernest Hemingway ("To Have and Have Not") and Raymond Chandler ("The Big Sleep"). This third match-up, from 1947, is a film-noir venture based on a novel called "Dark Passage" by a lesser-known American writer named David Goodis. A glance at the book shows that it is packed with noir ingredients: homicide, double-dealing, revenge, two mysterious women—one virtuous and one deadly—and another element that often turned up in crime fiction of the day, plastic surgery. Here the main character, Vincent Parry (Bogart), is a man who has been wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. He escapes from San Quentin and is taken in tow by a beautiful woman named Irene Jansen (Bacall) who appears out of nowhere to give him shelter and help clear his name while he recovers from surgery intended to disguise his identity. Naturally they fall in love. Most of what happens during the film's 106 minutes is hooey, but it is entertaining hooey. The Warner Brothers production, with screenplay and direction by Delmer Daves, invites us to ignore the story's implausibility and enjoy an exciting ride. While some film critics have called "Dark Passage" a failure, I would be somewhat more charitable. The story is far-fetched, but many of its weaknesses are redeemed by the presence of the two stars. Bogart and Bacall work so well together that I wouldn't mind watching them do a dog-food commercial. There is a dog (substitute the B-word) in this movie—a character named Madge Rapf. She is played by Agnes Moorehead, who turns her supporting role into a tour-de-force. Bruce Bennett plays Bob, Irene's ex-boyfriend; and Tom D'Andrea, Clifton Young and Houseley Stevenson are admirable in small but important roles. A song called "Too Marvelous for Words" is heard throughout the film, but it doesn't function as well as the title song in "Laura" or—how could it?—"As Time Goes By" in "Casablanca." "Dark Passage" takes place mostly in San Francisco and is shot mainly at night, enabling art director Charles H. Clarke and cinematographer Tom Hickox to create a mood that is by turns menacing and hair-raising. At the end the setting switches abruptly to South America, where Vincent is again on the lam. A short scene reunites the lovers, and the screen glows with sentiment as a nightclub band plays "Too Marvelous for Words," but Goodis did not include this scene in his book. His novel ends with Vincent asking Irene to join him south of the border at a future date, and the reader is left wondering if she actually will. More about David Goodis: he belonged to that unhappy breed of writers who have early success and then descend into alcoholism or some other mode of self-destruction. After "Dark Passage"—his second novel—Goodis's life gradually deteriorated, but he published 16 more suspense novels before dying in 1967 at the age of 50. In 1960 his "Down There" was transformed by director François Truffaut into a film called "Shoot the Piano Player."