starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Agnes Moorehead
directed by Delmer Daves
Convicted murderer Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) escapes from San Quentin and hitches a ride with the first vehicle he sees. The ride ends abruptly when the driver figures out that Parry is an escaped prisoner. Parry knocks the driver out and takes his clothes. Another car pulls up driven by Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall) just as Parry is trying to figure out what to do next. She helps him evade the police and takes him to her apartment in San Francisco.
It turns out that Jansen knows who he is. She felt like he got a raw deal when he was put on trial for killing his wife. She gives him some money and gets him some new clothes.
Parry gets his face changed but other things start to go wrong for him. His best friend gets murdered. The police assume that Parry did it. Madge, an acquaintance of Jansen and Parry, starts poking around asking questions. Baker, the man who picked Parry up when he first escaped from Sab Quentin, returns. He threatens to tell the police where they can find Parry unless he pays him $60,000. Parry has to think fast in order to evade going back to prison or keep Jansen from getting in trouble.
I have seen the other three films that Bogart and Bacall made together multiple times but this was my first time watching Dark Passage.
Bogart's face doesn't appear on screen until about an hour into the movie, at the point when the bandages come off after his plastic surgery. A picture of what Parry looked like before the surgery appears in the movie a few times. The person in the picture was played by Frank Wilcox. I have seen several films that Wilcox has been in but I don't think he starred or had big roles in any of them.
Many of the scenes in the first hour were shot from Parry's POV. I liked how that gave some of the supporting actors a chance to talk directly to the camera. I'm sure that not everyone agrees with me about this.
This was a lot of fun. I was hooked early on. I thought the supporting cast was quite good, especially Agnes Moorehead who played Madge. The film does get a bit melodramatic here and there but not excessively so. Not perfect but I thought it was solidly good and I would be happy to watch it again, maybe on the big screen.
Also included on the DVD that I borrowed from the library were the following extras.
Slick Hare (1947)
8 minutes
Elmer Fudd, a waiter in a swanky Los Angeles restaurant, chases Bugs Bunny around the restaurant after Humphrey Bogart orders rabbit for dinner. I don't recall ever seeing this cartoon before but I might have seen it ages ago. It was fun to watch.
Hold Your Breath and Cross Your Fingers: The Story of Dark Passage (2003)
10 minutes
This short documentary feature was informative but didn't add a huge amount of information about the making of the movie. Film critic Leonard Maltin, Bogart biographer Eric Lax, and TCM host Robert Orborne were interviewed for this feature.
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