Dark Passage
directed by Delmer Daves, 1947

Of the four movies Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together, Dark Passage is easily the weakest. (The others were To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Key Largo.) It's a noir film that has what it thinks is a neat idea (the first third of the movie uses a "first-person" camera, meaning the central character is the camera viewpoint) but it falls flat.

In fact, the gimmick pretty much ruins the film because we don't get to see (and therefore connect with) Humphrey Bogart's character. In the first third, we don't see him period. He is the camera viewpoint. In the second third, his head is bandaged (due to plastic surgery to alter his identity).

We don't actually see Bogie till a large chunk of the movie is over. By the time we do, we're bored.

Bogart plays a character wrongly accused and convicted of murder. The movie opens with his escape. On the run, he is rescued by Lauren Bacall's character. (Everyone Bogart runs into conveniently have some connection to the story.)

A helpful cab driver later recommends a shady plastic surgeon to Bogart's character. Bogart gets his face changed then goes off in search of the criminals who framed him so he prove his innocence.

Despite trying, the movie never gets very interesting. For one thing, there is very little to relieve the darkness of the noir approach. There is little chemistry between Bogart and Bacall and this is largely because they play so few scenes together, at least in the first two thirds.

The characters do have scenes, but since Bogart isn't physically in them (because of the camera viewpoint or because his head is wrapped in bandages and he can't talk), the Bogie-Bacall magic is absent.

The other problem is the improbable convenience mentioned above - the helpful cab driver, a guy who picks up Bogart when he is hitchhiking, Bacall's appearance ... it's a little too improbable.

The only time we get a sense for an interesting story is at the very end when Bogart and Bacall have fled to South America. Suddenly the heavy handed noir atmosphere is relieved and we get something that has more of the atmosphere of Casablanca or To Have and Have Not.

It seems clear that the movie has misread what made Bogart and Bacall so interesting together. It certainly misreads Bogart.

Despite the success of movies like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon, it wasn't the noir genre that made Bogart popular. It was that he was playing a flawed romantic hero within them.

In Dark Passage he simply plays a schmuck floundering around trying to prove his innocence. He doesn't play a strong character. If anything, the character is rather weak.

And so we end up with tedious movie, one that relies on something of a gimmick rather than the power Bogart and Bacall could bring to the screen.

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