You’re an escaped convict who’s just busted out of San
Quentin. You get picked up on the road by a stranger who asks too many
questions, and when he hears the guy on the radio say there’s been a bust out
at the prison he puts two and two together. You tell him to stop the car and
you slug him. You drag him into the bushes and another car comes along. It’s a
beautiful woman named Irene Jansen who looks like Lauren Bacall and knows who
you are and wants to help you. You go with her and hide out at her San
Francisco apartment. But you know you’ve got to run or the cops’ll nab you. Irene
buys you a fresh suit of clothes and gives you some dough, because for some
crazy reason, she believes you’re innocent. You don’t remember her, but she was
at your trial every day. After a few days you take off in the middle of the
night and get picked up by a cab driver who just happens to know a good plastic
surgeon and for a couple of hundred he fixes your face so nobody’ll know who
you are. You go back to Irene/Bacall’s apartment wrapped up in gauze like the
Mummy. After a week or two you take the bandages off and guess what? Now you
look like Humphrey Bogart!
Such is the improbable and gimmicky plotline for “Dark
Passage†(1947), the third feature film vehicle from Warner Bros. to star Betty
and Bogie. And if that were all there were to it, it wouldn’t be much of a
movie. But the flick is based on a novel by David Goodis, the poet laureate of Philadelphia
noir, and in typical Goodis fashion, after Vincent Parry becomes Bogie, his
troubles only multiply. He’s caught in a situation that seems to have no
resolution. He was sent to San Quentin for murdering his wife. Of course, he’s
innocent but the evidence was stacked against him. Now that he’s free, he wants
to find out who did kill her and clear his name. Easy? Not on your life.
The plot involves a shrill harpy played by Agnes
Moorehead, a friend of Irene who seems to get a kick of out of kicking people
when they’re down-- when she isn’t annoying them. There’s the guy who first
picked Parry up and got dumped in the bushes for his trouble. He shows up later
as a blackmailer, because he knows about the plastic surgery. There’s a nice
enough guy played by Bruce Bennet who was too nice to close the deal with
Betty, and knows he’s got no chance with her now that Bogie’s around. There’s a
tough cop at an all-night diner played by Douglas Kennedy who sizes Parry up as
a man on the run and wants to take him downtown. It all spins round and round
with Parry caught in a circumstantial whirlpool, dragging him down into
oblivion.
“Dark Passage†came out the same year as Robert
Montgomery’s “Lady in the Lake.†In that adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s
novel, Montgomery filmed the entire movie using the camera as Philip Marlowe’s
point of view. Everything is seen as though through Marlowe’s eyes. As if “Dark
Passage†doesn’t have a gimmicky enough plot, Daves decided to really gimmick
it up by following Montgomery’s example. He shot the entire first half of the
film using a hand-held camera, one of the first of its kind. All the action in
the first half of the film is from Parry’s eye-level view of things. Sid
Hickox’s cinematography provides some great imagery, especially at the
beginning, as Parry gets his first view of freedom from inside an empty oil
drum. The scenes where Parry is in the chair facing a really creepy plastic
surgeon (Housely Stevenson) and the subsequent nightmare he has about it later,
are classic examples of film noir cinematography.
But while it may have been a good artistic choice to shoot it that way, Warners wasn’t too happy about financing a movie with Humphrey Bogart where you don’t even see him until the second half of the picture. Apparently his fans didn’t like the idea much either. And, according to a brief documentary included on the Warner Archive Blu-Ray disc, Bogie had begun to slip in popularity after going to Washington to protest the House Unamerican Activities Committee’s proceedings that had resulted in some of his friends going to jail. As a result, the film was only a moderate success. Nevertheless, and despite what sounds like a farfetched idea for a story, “Dark Passage†is a good film that has gained in reputation over the years and should be seen by all Bogie/Bacall fans and those who enjoy the kind of stories that they tell in noirville.
But as good as the movie is, Goodis’s novel is even better. David Goodis is sort of a forgotten man in the literary world. Not as famous as Chandler, Cain or even Cornell Woolrich, Goodis wrote a string of books with titles like “Street of No Return.†“Moon in the Gutter,†“Night Squad,†“Street of the Lost,†and “The Wounded and the Slain.†“Dark Passage†was Goodis’s first novel. Although he would later write mostly about characters trapped in hopeless situations in the low-rent district of his hometown of Philadelphia, he set this story in San Francisco and as a first time novelist he hit pay dirt. It was first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and caught the attention of Jack Warner who bought it, thinking it would be a good Bogie/Bacall vehicle. Director Delmer Daves filmed it on location there, although, because of the claustrophobic atmosphere resulting from Parry having to stay in hiding most of the time, it could have been shot almost anywhere. One problem I have with the film is that basically Daves isn’t a film noir director. Too many scenes were shot in bright California daylight. But I digress.
Goodis was a really weird guy. He started out writing for the pulps and, although he was later a successful writer in Hollywood, hobnobbing with movie stars at their favorite watering holes, he never lived in his own place. Instead of renting or buying a house, he lived in the homes of friends, sleeping on their sofas, wearing the same rumpled suit for weeks on end, until he was asked to leave and find somebody else to mooch off of. Eventually he went back to Philly and lived with his parents and a schizophrenic brother. He continued to write. One of his more successful projects was a film called “The Burglar,†for which he wrote the screenplay. It was shot in the City of Brotherly love with Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield. See it. There’s also a French version of the story with Jean Paul Belmondo called “The Burglars.â€
Goodis died in 1967 at age 49 from a stroke. Reportedly he was mugged and beaten by a robber days before his “cerebral vascular accident,†as it was called on the death certificate. In an ironic twist to the story, shortly before his death he sued ABC television for copyright infringement. He argued that David Janssen’s TV series, “The Fugitive,†the story of a man on the run after being accused of killing his wife was a steal from “Dark Passage.†His estate continued the suit after his death but lost when ABC proved that the story had first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post without a copyright in his name, thus making the property public domain. Poor old Goodis. No wonder he wrote stories with titles like “Street of the Lost.â€
Warners has done a nice job presenting “Dark Passage†on Blu-ray. The picture is very film-like with a nice fine grain to it. The disc includes a short documentary which is entitled “Hold Your Breath and Cross Your Fingers.†It’s informative but I can’t figure out for the life of me why they called it that. Also on the disc is a great Merrie Melodies cartoon with Bugs and nice caricatures of some of the stars from the forties, as well as the theatrical preview. Do I have to tell you to buy this one?
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John M. Whalen is the author of "Hunting Monsters is My Business: The Mordecai Slate Stories" . Click here to order the book from Amazon)