Dark Passage

This is a bit of an odd movie. It's one of the four Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together, and it seems like the least well-known of the quartet (the others being Key Largo, The Big Sleep, and To Have and Have Not).

Bogart plays Vincent Parry, sent to prison after being falsely convicted of killing his wife. Unlike Andy Dufresne, Parry doesn't plan to stay locked up for twenty years. The movie starts with his escape from San Quentin, and when Irene (Bacall) comes across him having knocked out a man and stealing his clothes, she helps him escape in her car, and lets him hide in her apartment.

We don't see Bogart's face for the first hour. Everything is either shot as though from his perspective or with his face in shadow. That's because Vincent Parry isn't supposed to look like Bogart until after a helpful cab driver takes him to an off-the-books plastic surgeon who fixes him up. Even then, he spends another 20 minutes wearing bandages while hiding in Irene's apartment because his best friend was beaten to death with his own trumpet. This does have the effect of establishing that Parry and Irene have a shared acquaintance, a woman named Madge who likes to butt into everyone's business and is apparently extremely greedy and selfish.

It's only after all that, the movie starts actually getting somewhere. We had no idea what Parry was planning to do? Escape? Find the real killer? Of course, the very first place Parry goes with his new face, he acts awkwardly enough a cop gets suspicious and he has to run. Which would seem to have made that entire hour a waste of time.

The movie had to throw in a whole other subplot about a guy who hopes to get rich using Parry just to a) pad things out, and b) help Parry figure out who actually is killing people. Not that it helps.

It's a mess of a movie. Pacing is poor, story's not structured very well. It just sort of sputters out with this bit in the bus station where it looks like he'll get pinched while he's calling Irene, but he doesn't. I get the reason for not wanting to show Bogart's face if you're wanting it to play that he got his features changed, but in practice it's awkward and clunky. The thing that kept coming up that interested me is how many people are willing to help Parry out, either because they think he's innocent or whatever. I guess you could take it as a lot of people understand that just because you fight with your spouse, doesn't mean you'll kill them. Or that even in the 1940s people had issues with the United States' justice/prison system.