"You know, it's wonderful when guys like you lose out. Makes guys like me think maybe we got a chance in this world."
Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart)
I like all four of the movies that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together — each for a different reason.
And the reason I like "Dark Passage," which premiered on this day in 1947, is simple. It was the most creative of the four.
For about the first half of the movie, the audience never saw Bogart's face. A few times the viewers saw the figure of a man, but they could not see his face. They saw a photograph of a man in the newspaper who was supposed to be Bogart — but definitely was not Bogart. In fact it was a picture of character actor Frank Wilcox, who made a name for himself on TV.
Bogart played a man who had been convicted of killing his wife and escaped from prison. He got some assistance from Lauren Bacall, who, as it turned out, had been interested in his case and had attended his trial — although Bogart's character hadn't known that at the time.
AS I say, for the first hour of the movie, Bogart's face was not visible, which was a source of considerable anxiety for studio head Jack Warner. Bogart was Warner's most bankable star, but no one saw his face for more than an hour. Either things were seen from his perspective or his face was hidden by bandages after he got plastic surgery, which radically altered his appearance — as long as you believed that picture really was a pre–surgery photo of that character.
Once she helped Bogart remove the bandages, Bacall essentially disappeared from the story. She returned at the very end.
Bogart, meanwhile, had to fend off a blackmail attempt — in so doing, he learned the truth about who had killed his wife and his closest friend. It was Agnes Moorehead, Bogart's spurned lover who had testified against him in court.
Bogart's character wanted to record Madge confessing, and he had an advantage in that she didn't know who he was with his new face. He went to her home, posing as someone with a romantic interest in her acting on a recommendation from a mutual friend.
After he had gained her confidence and been allowed into Madge's home, he revealed his true identity to her. He told her that he had evidence proving her guilt, hoping to coerce her into making a confession, but she ended up falling from a window to her death, never having confessed.
"Dark Passage" was truly an exception to the theatrical rule. I'm not talking about how most of the first half of the movie was seen from Bogart's point of view. I'm talking about how that part was supported by first–person narration, not in the flashback kind of way that was used in movies like "Sunset Boulevard" but as a real–time kind of thing. Few pictures, then or now, could do something like that from start to finish — and, to be fair, "Dark Passage" stopped doing it after the viewers were allowed to see Bogart's face.
But it was effective when it was being used.
