Dark Passage

Buy This Item Dark Passage by MGM (Video & DVD)  Available from Amazon  $19.98  on 11-29-2008     This gimmicky film noir stars Humphrey Bogart as an escaped criminal who undergoes plastic surgery and holes up at the home of Lauren Bacall's character while healing and preparing to prove his innocence. If you can last through the first half-hour of this thing--which is shot entirely from the subjective view of Bogart's bandaged face, which we don't see until later--you might find ample reason in the stars' performances to stick around for the conclusion. But director Delmer Daves (<I>A Summer Place</I>) tests a viewer's endurance with such an obvious, attention-getting ploy. The least of the Bogart-Bacall vehicles (<I>The Big Sleep</I>,<I>To Have and Have Not</I>, <I>Key Largo</I>). <I>--Tom Keogh</I> Reader Reviews Dark Passage is less of a partnership between them than are other Bogart-Bacall movies .He is very much the star in this picture while she has a much less impactful role .This may be one reason that for all its qualities -and it has many-the movie lags a little way behind their other collaborations . Bogart plays Vincent Parry who escapes from San Quentin whence he had been sent for the murder of his wife.He is picked up by Irene Jansen (Bacall) a woman long obsessed with the case and who believes him to be innocent .She hides him in her San Francisco apartment from which base he venyures out to visit an unlicensed plastic surgeon who give him a new face -that of Bogart.He uses this disguise to dodge the police and go in search of the real killer bu=y so doing clear his name . A year previously The Lady in The Lake ,starring Robert Montgomery ,had made use of the subjective camera filming the action through the eyes of its hero Phillip Marlowe.Dark Passage deploys a similar technique and we see the action in the opening half of the movie through Parry's eyes .It is only when the bandages are removed after surgery that we glimpse Bogart .Frankly,it doesn't work .We know the man is Bogart ,if only for the voice over narration being delivered in his unmistakeable tones.The Bacall-Bogart chemistry is strangely muted here and it is really only in the romantic dinner sequence with Too Marvellous For Words playing in the background that the relationship between their characters really takes wing . The stars are fine as ever but are not helped by a convoluted screenplay by future director Delmer Daves .Acting honours are stolen by Agnes Moorehead who looks very scary indeed in the movie and the cameos from tom D'Andrea as a cabbie and Clifton Young as a small time crook give proceedings a decided lift. The opening is sharp and pithy and it does sustain interest but it is not a top drawer movie -simply solid entertainment but without the cutting edge of such pictures as The Big Sleep

Dark Passage Available from Amazon Price: $19.98 Updated on 11-29-2008.

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