A cabbie greets us as we prepare to enter the office of an unlicensed plastic surgeon. I say “us” because what we are seeing is shot from the first-person perspective, giving this the feel of one of those horrible FMV (full-motion video) computer games of the 90’s. Much like that format, the characters also dump exposition in an awkward manner that only sets up the very next scene that is about to happen. But this isn’t one of those games–this is 1947’s Dark Passage.
This noir is particularly notable for such scenes which dominate the first act, where most of it was shot in the first-person perspective. Ostensibly, this format was used because the escaped prisoner played by Humphrey Bogart has yet to receive the surgery will alter his appearance to that of…Humphrey Bogart. But this gimmick only calls attention to itself, an excessive bit of showmanship that had me wondering why people gave Hitchcock’s Rope so much flack when all it did was stage the action as one continuously flowing piece that was seemingly without edits. One moment here foretells that movie when the camera pushes in on the back of Lauren Bacall’s head and pulls back out again, presumably only to cover a change in camera angle.
I can understand wanting to engage in some sort of subterfuge to work around Bogie’s character having a different face initially, but this doesn’t cut it. They could have used another actor on screen and had Bogie dub in his distinctive voice. In an early scene in a cab, the face of the actor who is not yet Bogie is kept in shadow, and I think such an approach would have worked better overall.
Admittedly, the first time this technique is used is rather novel, as we see part of Bogie’s prison escape from his point of view inside a barrel that is rolling down a hillside. I thought that was a clever touch, but I found my heart sinking as we saw more and more footage from that perspective. One would think a movie shot in the way a character really see things would be more natural and garner greater empathy. Instead, it only increases the artificiality and puts a barrier between us and the material. Even worse, the cuts away from that perspective only increase that disconnect.
This jarring back-and-forth is especially prevalent when Bacall’s mysterious stranger conceals Bogie in her car right after he had pummeled the first man to give him a ride (Clifton Young). Neither we nor he know at this point the reason for her assistance, which goes so far as to let him use her apartment for an extended period of time while he recovers from the surgery. Later, he’ll learn her father had been convicted of the murder of her step-mother. Believing her father had been wrongly accused, she saw similarities in Bogie’s case and so becomes drawn to the man.
The fugitive only underwent the surgery because of a recommendation from Tom D’Andrea’s cabbie. That character is emblematic of some of the flaws in the script overall. Realizing he has an escaped murderer as his fare, he doesn’t go to the police. He even makes the curious decision to tell his fare he knows his true identity, which I would think could only put the cabbie in danger. Better yet, he just happens to know a disgraced surgeon who does plastic surgery. So, this is a character who behaves illogically and is improbably only one step removed from another character who will advance the plot. As for the plastic surgeon, my hopes went unfulfilled that he would be Peter Lorre’s Dr. Einstein from Arsenic & Old Lace.
And most of the people in the world of this picture have noticeably few degrees of separation between each other. A key one is Agnes Moorehead, a close friend of Bacall’s who drops by her apartment the first day the fugitive is hiding there. She also just happened to be the witness at the trial whose testimony sealed his fate. Bogie recognizes her through the peephole and tells her to go away, yet she doesn’t recognize his voice, which I didn’t believe. And he has a history with her, without apparently having any previous knowledge of Bacall, who is supposed to be such a close friend of hers.
The movie will wisely drop the first-person gimmick once the bandages are off, and we see Bogie is, in fact, Bogie. It isn’t exactly a revelation. Unfortunately, the movie will continue to pile on the inanities, as people close to our lead get killed and a blackmailer worms their way into the plot. At one point, a character will pull back a curtain and charge through a floor-to-ceiling window, plummeting to their death. It is a moment of questionable physics and character intentions, leading my wife to ask, “Did she just forget that window was there?”
I wonder what motivated Bogie and Bacall to do this picture. Nothing in the plot is remotely believable, and neither are the characters nor the dialogue. I’m not even sure why the picture is titled Dark Passage, but it does make me think of the body part from which I assume the screenwriter extracted this.
Dir: Delmer Daves
Starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Agnes Moorehead
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray