Dark Passage | | Cast : | Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall | | Director : | Delmer Daves | | Studio : | Warner Home Video | | Format : | Black & White, Closed-captioned | | Released Date : | September 27, 1947 | | DVD Released Date : | November 04, 2003 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), French (Subtitled), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | NR (Not Rated) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 23, 2005 | | Summary | Interesting Bogart... | Content
 | This is a little different for Bogart and Bacall, but I found it quite interesting and worth the watch for sure. The premise of the movie dictates that you don't see Bogart's face till quite a ways into the movie, and it's very interesting to see the movie work with that angle. Overall, I think that even weaker movies by Bogart and Bacall are great! This may not be non-stop intensity, but it's still exciting. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 23, 2005 | | Summary | Lackluster. | Content
| Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and sent away to San Quentin prison for life. He escapes, but has little chance of getting away until a stranger named Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall) helps him evade the police. Irene is a wealthy San Francisco painter who hides Vincent in her home. While he is alone in the house, a woman whose voice Vincent recognizes comes to the door looking for Irene. The woman is Madge Rapf (Agnes Moorehead), who gave false testimony at Vincent's trial. Vincent realizes he must find a better way of concealing himself.
"Dark Passage" was based on the novel "The Dark Road" by David Goodis. It was the third film to pair superstar couple Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and Warner Brothers had high hopes for box office success. They were disappointed, however, by the film's tepid reception, which was blamed on Bogart and Bacall's public protests of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington. That might account for some lack of box office, but "Dark Passage" isn't a good a film as it should have been.
"Dark Passage" is perhaps best remembered for its first person camera, which is accompanied by Vincent's first person voice-over narration. For the first hour of the film, we see the world as Vincent sees it, through his eyes, but we don't see his face. This technique is interesting at first, but it quickly becomes tedious, even though it is justified within the narrative. Humphrey Bogart was one of the world's biggest movie stars, and the audience hardly sees his face. No wonder they didn't flock to the theaters. Bogart's talent is also underutilized. Vincent is an underwritten character without much depth. So is Irene. The dialogue is dull. There just isn't much going on under the surface in "Dark Passage". The good character roles are in the supporting cast: Agnes Moorehead as the jealous, shrill villain and Houseley Stevenson as a really creepy plastic surgeon. Bogart and Bacall are at their most mediocre.
"Dark Passage" isn't a bad film. It isn't a good one either. It's a somewhat entertaining murder mystery. But its superficiality and gimmicks remind me of a B-movie. And if it had been a B-movie I might have rated it higher. But this a major studio film with A-list talent that just doesn't deliver. It suffered from high expectations in 1947 just as it does now. But Warner Brothers should have been able to come up with a better script.
The DVD (Warner Brothers 2003): Bonus features include a short documentary, a cartoon, and a theatrical trailer (2 minutes). "Hold Your Breath and Cross Your Fingers: The Story of Dark Passage" (10 minutes) explores making the film, the principle people involved, the film's reception and style, and includes interviews with film critic Leonard Maltin and film historian Robert Osbourne. "Slick Hare" (7 1/2 minutes) is a Bugs Bunny cartoon featuring Humphrey Bogart himself, who orders fried rabbit in a posh restaurant. Subtitles for the feature are available in English, French, and Spanish. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 09, 2005 | | Summary | The Softer Side of Bogart & Bacall | Content
| The absorbing documentary featurette on the DVD edition of the 1947 mystery DARK PASSAGE (DP) suggests that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall's participation in the star-studded Committee for the First Amendment, intended to defend colleagues called before the HUAC, might have been the reason that DP wasn't as big a hit as the real/reel-life couple's earlier screen collaborations. However, I suspect that audiences past and present may have found DP harder to cozy up to because, instead of the cool, insolent, wisecracking Bogart & Bacall of TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT and THE BIG SLEEP, this film version of David Goodis' novel THE DARK ROAD presents a more melancholy, vulnerable Bogart & Bacall -- which is not at all a bad thing, just unexpected from this star team at that time. That Bogart & Bacall chemistry is still there, but it's sweeter here, as if they'd decided to let down their collective guard and allow tenderness to take over. Instead of the cocksure Bogart character we all know and love, DP protagonist Vincent Parry is wary, fearful, fumbling in his attempts to clear himself of his wife's murder and escape the cops like he escapes from prison in the film's opening scenes. His only allies include the mysterious Irene Jansen (Bacall), who followed his case during his trial and ends up in a position to help hide him while he proves his innocence, and Sam (Tom D'Andrea), a kindly, lonesome cabbie who steers Parry to a back-alley plastic surgeon (Houseley Stevenson) to get a new face to help him elude the law better.
1947 seemed to be The Year of the Subjective Camera, with DP's first hour shot from Bogart's point of view and Robert Montgomery's LADY IN THE LAKE using the technique throughout. Unlike LADY..., DP's plastic surgery gimmick provides a good plot reason for the audience not to initially see Bogart's face, though we frequently hear that unmistakable Bogart voice to make up for it. We also get to see the lovely Bacall and lots of spellbinding character actors in lieu of Bogie. There isn't an uninteresting face or a bad performance in the bunch, with standout performances from the leads, D'Andrea, Stevenson (wise, kindly, and vaguely sinister all at once), Rory Mallinson as Parry's musician friend, the ever-dependable Bruce Bennett, cheap hood Clifton Young (with an oily grin and a cleft chin that looks like it got lost on the way to Cary Grant's face), and especially the magnificent Agnes Moorehead as Madge Rapf, the kind of woman who won't join any club that'll have her as a member, a stylish dame who spreads stress and misery wherever she goes. Sticking her nose into everyone's business, Madge manages to lure people to her and push them away at the same time, and if she can't have you, she'll make damn sure nobody else can have you, even if that means murder. With her delivery dripping honey one minute and venom the next (especially in her climactic scene with Bogart), the quicksilver Moorehead's commanding presence and her unconventional, undeniably striking good looks ensure that you can't take your eyes off her whenever she's onscreen.
If you're looking for a tight mystery plot, look elsewhere. While DP has many suspenseful moments, it's primarily a character study and a mood piece about loneliness, redemption, and starting over, with a strong undercurrent of postwar paranoia, all underscored beautifully by Franz Waxman's stirring music (with contributions by an uncredited Max Steiner). The bus station scene is a touching example of this. But the reactions of people who meet Parry with his post-op face and new name, "Allan Linnell," are so suspicious I wondered if writer/director Delmer Daves (who cameos as the photo of Irene's doomed dad. His real-life kids have bit parts, too) was indicating that Parry was really projecting his own paranoia onto the people around him. His new name in particular makes people look at him like he just dropped in from the planet Neptune: "Linnell? That's a very unusual name." What's so freakin' unusual about it?! What, it's not blandly Anglo-Saxon enough? I wonder if John Linnell of They Might Be Giants fame ever had to field such questions...but I digress... :-)
Even when DP drops the subjective camera style so we can see Bogart in all his glory, the visuals are striking thanks to Sid Hickox's moody black-and-white photography (although with the emphasis on Madge's love of all things orange, I can imagine a partly-colorized version a la SIN CITY, with everything black-and-white except Madge's orange clothes and belongings... :-) and some innovative visual techniques. I particularly liked the use of the glass floor when Bogart discovers a dead body -- a tip of the hat to Alfred Hitchcock's THE LODGER, perhaps? Speaking of Hitchcock, DP and Hitch's 1958 classic VERTIGO might make an interesting double feature since they share themes of loss, loneliness, new identities and fresh starts as well as a San Francisco setting. If you want to see a softer side of Bogart & Bacall, DP is well worth watching. You may also enjoy the DVD's other fun extras, like the original theatrical trailer (for me, the hyperbole of movie trailers of that era is part of their charm) and SLICK HARE, one of the Bugs Bunny cartoons affectionately lampooning Bogart (word has it that Bogart liked to pal around with the animators at Warner Bros.' "Termite Terrace" and he actually did his own voice work for SLICK HARE and 8-BALL BUNNY).
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| Rating | | | Date | May 30, 2005 | | Summary | "I'll make you look as if you've lived." | Content
| Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) has been convicted of murdering his wife; at the start of "Dark Passage," he's escaped from San Quentin and is on the run. He has no where to turn, no one to help him. However, he happens upon a helpful painter, Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall), and things start to look up for Parry. Before long, however, trouble comes knocking.
"Dark Passage" is solid crime noir: not quite the top of the genre, but very entertaining nevertheless. Seeing Bogart and Bacall together is always a joy, although "Dark Passage" is a somewhat odd pairing -- mostly because Bogart is not seen by the audience for the first half of the movie. The gimmick is that the movie is seen from his perspective until he undergoes plastic surgery, then the new Parry emerges as Bogart. The technique is a bit stagey and awkward at times, but the talented cast pulls it through. Bogart gives a good performance, although the majority of it is essentially voice-over, and Bacall is as beautiful as ever. The supporting cast is also solid, particularly Agnes Moorehead as the meddling Madge.
Based on the book by David Goodis ("Shoot the Piano Player), the plot is pretty unbelievable, but no more improbable than many other good noir films. The cinematography is quite nice and makes good use of the San Francisco setting. Overall, "Dark Passage" is great fun -- watch it, enjoy it, and forget about the glaring plot holes. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 23, 2005 | | Summary | Hard night with the little woman. | Content
| Saw Dark Passage late one night on TBS, after I'd been fired from a job. Found solace in the hunted & haunted Bogart character, Vincent Parry: escaped from Quentin, he's out to prove his innocence.
Bacall is his ally, Irene; Agnes Morehead is Madge, friend & bane to all. If this is the lesser of the Bogart-Bacall vehicles, it still remains my sentimental favorite.
There are some winning exchanges here. Taking desperate measures to avoid capture, Parry allows a cabbie to deliver him into the hands of a genuine back-alley surgeon (Houseley Stevenson, a former theatrical agent): "There's so such thing as courage; there's only fear: the fear of dying & the fear of getting old. That's why people live so long."
After surgery, Parry discovers that a confederate's been killed, & he can barely make it back to Irene's place, chugging up lengthy staircases in hilly 'Frisco. The sunrise shots can make the viewer's eyes burn, like he's been up all night. Later, Parry is stalked by a small-time hood who hopes to bilk Bacall, thru Parry, outta thousands. Hood: "I always had a good head for figures." Parry: "My only interest in your head is how easy it'll crack open." Hood: "I'm annoying ya, huh?"
When he confronts Madge with the evidence that she not only killed his wife but his confederate George as well, she goes roaring thru the picture window of her highrise: "She'll never have you & that's the way I want it."
Nice exteriors of San Francisco, & nobody ever looked hotter in a Pendleton shirt than Bacall. Also with Bruce Bennett (later with Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre) & the forever-invasive cop Douglas Kennedy. Parry: "I always thought I looked pretty normal." Kennedy: "Yeah, but you asked for the race results at Santa Anita: not normal." |
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