Alright! Another Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall team-up! Those usually work out well for me. I think they ended up making four movies together (and spent more years happily married), but I’m not 100% sure on that. All I know is HBO Max said this one was leaving at the end of the month, and while those older movies have a habit of coming back before too long, well, I don’t exactly need an excuse to watch one of these.
Granted, the way HBO Max has been silently dropping all kinds of things in the wake of the Discovery merger, maybe I should get back to these older movies soon before someone over there decides Turner Classic Movies isn’t worth the bandwidth or something.
Vincent Parry (Bogart, sort of) has just escaped from San Quentin prison and is looking to get to San Francisco. Parry was convicted of the murder of his wife, and while he claimed innocence, the judge and jury didn’t believe him. Though he does get very close to stealing a car while hitchhiking when the driver recognizes him, he doesn’t need to take that vehicle. He’s instead found by Irene Jansen (Bacall), a stranger who happened to be out painting landscapes when the news bulletin hit about Parry’s escape. It just so happens Jansen believes Parry is innocent thanks to her father’s conviction of murder under similar circumstances. She takes Parry back to San Francisco, and he in turn eventually gets to a shady plastic surgeon to give himself a new face. Only then does he feel he can try and find his wife’s real killer.
That “new face” thing actually leads to an interesting gimmick. The first third or so of the movie is shown from Parry’s point of view. The audience can hear Bogart’s distinctive voice and see what he sees, but he never so much as looks in a mirror as he goes about his business. A photo from a newspaper clipping is supposed to be Parry’s original face, and the man looks nothing like Bogie. At around the one third mark, Parry has had his surgery and his face is heavily bandaged. Bogart’s eyes and hair are visible, but he’s also told he can’t really talk for a week as everything sets. When the bandages finally come off in the final act, yeah, it’s Humphrey Bogart alright, and it is here where both his face and voice come back, allowing him to move around the city somewhat covertly as he looks for the killer.
As gimmicks go, it isn’t bad. True, I would have preferred to hear more of Bogart’s narration in the middle third as even that stops, but Bacall herself is arguably sharper than he is in this movie. I did get the feeling that the gimmick became more important than the actual movie. For a man interested in clearing his name, Parry doesn’t spend much of the movie actually looking for clues or anything. That middle section showing his recovery seems like it might have almost came out of a different movie, not helped by the fact that it seems most people in San Francisco seem to more or less know everybody, and Parry almost seemed to forget someone murdered his only friend while he was getting a new face.
That said, there’s still a lot of charm to these old noirs, and I do like me some Bogart and Bacall. It’s not their best team-up, but even a so-so team-up between those two is far better than many acting pairs’ best. I’ll have to double check to see if I have missed any of their others. I suspect as much, but as far as Dark Passage goes, without the gimmick and the lead actors, I don’t know that there’s much to note in this movie. Of course, the gimmick and the leads make the movie rather cool, so I can’t say I regret the viewing.
Grade: B+
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