“Completely preposterous,” is how the Chicago Tribune described Dark Passage in its 1947 review. No argument here. But did Delmer Daves, who wrote the screenplay and directed this bizarre noir, simply make a bad film, or was he saying something about the latent absurdities of the genre, in particular the way fate operates in it?
Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, an innocent man doing time in San Quentin for murdering his wife, who we first meet breaking out by stowing away in a garbage truck. He’s soon been picked up by a man who quickly works out who he is. Ructions follow, but Parry wins out, and is then picked up by the very woman who had been campaigning to prove his innocence all along – she’s motivated by the fact that the same miscarriage of justice had happened to her dad, she later explains.
Lauren Bacall plays Irene Jansen, young, beautiful, available and very rich and just happening to be in the San Quentin area at the moment Parry is breaking out. Later, having been given a suit of clothes by Jansen, Parry gets in a cab, falls into conversation with the driver, who, it turns out, knows a plastic surgeon who will alter the fugitive’s looks, no questions asked.
Later still, while Parry is hiding out at Jansen’s house, she gets a visit from Madge Rapf (Agnes Moorehead), the woman whose evidence sent Parry to jail in the first place. And later still, the guy who first picked Parry up, who turns out to be a blackmailer of some ability, returns to the story to put the squeeze on Parry, which propels the plot towards its denouement.
That’s four, at least, very unlikely turns of events.
Watch the scene where Parry and Jansen hash over the second most unlikely coincidence in all this – why she was out near San Quentin at just the right time – it’s a masterclass in deadpan exposition, with not a flicker of an eyeroll from either Bogart or Bacall. Nothing can really be done with the number one most unlikely coincidence, a cab driver who knows a cheap, good plastic surgeon, so it is just left there, almost mockingly.
Dark Passage is often described as being all shot subjectively, from Parry’s point of view – through his eyes, with the camera standing in for Bogart. If you look at a film like Lady in the Lake, made two years earlier, what you see is a film that actually was shot as if through its protagonist’s eyes in its entirety. It does subjective camera from beginning to end.
That’s not how it goes in Dark Passage at all. Daves flirts with the subjective point-of-view idea, picking it up at the moment the trash can Parry is hiding in falls from the back of the truck he’s escaping on, and returning to it periodically, using the first-person point-of-view as seasoning.
Where he does chime with Robert Montgomery’s earlier film is in the withholding of a glimpse of the face of its star. We hear Bogart’s voice in voiceover and in the conversations he has with various people, but we don’t see him until the bandages are coming off after his backstreet cosmetic surgery, at around an hour in.
One of film noir’s big claims is on realism – down these mean streets etc – and the point-of-view shooting style really emphasises everyday aspects of life in California in the 1940s: trams, incinerator chutes, wooden fence palings, radiograms. Fiction as historical record. But Daves’s film also seems determined to point out that noir is no more real or less stylised than a big Hollywood musical.
There’s a perfectly reasonable, beautifully shot film here, with a score by Franz Waxman that’s all brass and drama, and if you can ignore the coincidence issue it’s a perfectly decent noirish thriller with a whodunit aspect and some fine acting. Bacall is particularly good, outdoing Bogart, who gets hesitant here and there over some of the nonsense plotting.
The best thing in it is Agnes Moorehead, as the problematical, hysterical dried-up old maid whose testimony sent Vincent to San Quentin in the first place. While Moorehead is on screen it all just seems to work, because her performance exists on a different plane from everyone else’s, in the realm of grand guignol, almost horror. She fits in to Daves’s schematics in the way that Bacall and Bogart never really do. They want it to be plausible, perhaps, whereas she accepts that it isn’t, and cannot be. Who’s right, though?
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
