Dark Passage (dir. Delmer Daves)
-Jere Pilapil- 6.5/10 I’ve seen this movie before, in my college days, going through a noir phase or a Bogart phase. Either way, I’d forgotten this one and probably conflated it with Key Largo in my head as “one of the ones with Bogart and Bacall in it, but not The Big Sleep and not the one with the ‘you know how to whistle, don’t you?’ scene”. And in the end, that’s kind of what it deserves: Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage is a perfectly passable noir with a couple wrinkles that elevate it ever-so-slightly. The first of those wrinkles is that the first third or so is filmed from a perspective. Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, a prison escapee convicted of murdering his wife. Except he doesn’t look like Bogart, as we see in a photograph printed in newspapers all over (an uncredited Frank Wilcox in the photo). It’s from this perspective that we meet Lauren Bacall as Irene Jansen, a woman whose father suffered a similar fate as Parry: innocent but convicted of murder. She shelters and clothes him long enough for him to (oh my fucking god) get plastic surgery that makes him look like Bogart. This is probably the most interesting stretch of the movie, though not entirely successfully. Filming like this is limited and goofy: early, when Vincent throws a punch, it looks an awful lot like melee combat in a video game. But we do get to enjoy Irene bossing Vincent around a bit, and some fun character work by Tom D’Andrea as a cab driver. Throughout, I had an uneasy feeling that the whole movie might be like this, that Bogart - then the highest paid actor in Hollywood - somehow agreed to essentially a voice actor roll. But once the movie reveals Bogart and gets down to business, things get a bit generic. See, Vincent, of course, wants to escape the law and wants to investigate the murder of a friend. The set up for this is a bit too neat: Madge, a former fling and a witness who testified against him (Agnes Moorehead) and her current beau Bob (Bruce Bennett) happen to be close friends with Irene. It creates the feeling of too tight a circle, a snow globe world that is distractingly convenient to the plot. The performances, specifically Bacall but Moorehead and Clifton Young as a smalltime crook, elevate this thing, but the third act falls apart as Vincent corners the perpetrator with essentially no leverage, and the final scene of the film feels extremely tacked on. Bogart is basically on autopilot here, navigating a bumpy script. Still, there are a lot of fun corners explored here. It may just be a silly curio, but it’s an enjoyable enough one.