Here’s something you don’t see every day—a shot from the point of view of a floor on which a dead man sprawls. The departed is George Fellsinger (Rory Mallinson), and the guy in the bandages poignantly fingering George’s trumpet, which he’ll now never play in Peru (for such was George’s dream) is Vincent Parry, played, you may be able to tell, by Humphrey Bogart. The picture is 1947’s Dark Passage, one of the more irrational quasi-noirs of its day. “A multi-level masterpiece,” pronounced Surrealism-inflected critic Gerard Legrand in 1951. “It has for its ideological theme nothing less than a man’s discovery of his ‘definitive’ face.” And that ain’t all. The picture brims with straight-faced eccentricity, from the subjective camera scenes from the perspective of Bogart’s convict-on-the-lam character pre-plastic-surgery to one of Agnes Moorehead’s more florid performances. Quite a romp. Director Delmer Davies never made anything quite like it, before or after.
Saw this last summer, by chance. It’s indeed a doozy. Doesn’t quite, um, “work” but it sure is a hoot. Which is to say, I would recommend seeing it, if not seeking it out. When you get the reveal of the face Bogey’s character had before he had Bogey’s face… it’s hard not to howl.
Yeah, he’s on the run and gets plastic surgery to make him unrecognizable and less conspicuous, he eventually takes the bandages off and finds that the surgeon has made him look like… Humphrey Bogart. Great movie, but I was hung up on that for a minute.
@Charles; that’s one of the most interesting things about the picture—its pre-post-modernist innocence about such matters. To those of us watching now, the character’s transformation into “Humphrey Bogart” is one of the film’s most dissociative elements!
I actually kind of love this movie, partially because it IS so flamboyant, like Humoresque or Caged or a number of others from the same period. Daves is having a moment, which is nice to see.
I haven’t seen “Dark Passage” since I was a kid, but I still remember the subjective camera, the dreamy quality, and Agnes Moorehead overacting up a storm as she moves nearer and nearer to the windows…I love the ending, too.
I guess I should look again at those late Daves movies that were just released on DVD; the last half hour of “Susan Slade” was a howl on TCM recently. Aside from everything else, Daves wrote for Kay Francis and was her fairly steady boyfriend for a while, which speaks to his stamina.
“@Charles; that’s one of the most interesting things about the picture—its pre-post-modernist innocence about such matters. To those of us watching now, the character’s transformation into “Humphrey Bogart” is one of the film’s most dissociative elements!”
Wouldn’t it still have been pretty dissociative then, though? This is, after all, post THE MALTESE FALCON, CASABLANCA, and THE BIG SLEEP. I don’t think audiences were exactly ducking the proverbial train in 1947.
Plus, you’re only a year or so away here from when they start casting Bogart ironically, in a pomo vein (MADRE, LONELY PLACE). (Sorry for the postscript–I guess I prematurely hit send.)
Last time I was in SF I took this picture, seems the person who lives in the block of flats used in ‘Dark Passage’ has a nice sense of humour too as Humphrey Bogart can still be seen some 50 years on:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardjgibson/2353849595/in/set-72157604210051656/