Bogart. Bacall. Moorehead. Daves. TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 and 10 a.m. ET is Dark Passage (1947)

By David in TN
friday, may 3, 2024 at 7:52:00 p.m. edt

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 and 10 a.m. ET is Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage (1947) with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Agnes Moorehead, Clifton Young and Housely Stevenson.

Film Noir Guide: “Bogart is an escaped convict wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and Bacall is the oh-so helpful gal who hides him from the cops. Moorehead plays the shrew whose helpful testimony was responsible for sending Bogey to prison, Young is a blackmailing hood and Stevenson is the plastic surgeon providing Bogey with a new face.

“The acting is okay, with Bogart and Bacall the film’s saving grace, but the plot is unbelievable—populated with overly helpful strangers and unlikely coincidences. We don’t see Bogart’s face for most of the film because, for a time, the camera is his eyes (a technique used earlier by Robert Montgomery in Lady and [sic] the Lake), and later his face is entirely wrapped in bandages.”

“Anybody else but Bogey, please! The real killer’s fate is enjoyable to watch, but the ending is disappointing.”

David in TN: This one is recycled, as Dark Passage was on Noir Alley in July, 2018. There are some very good ones Red Eddie Muller hasn’t had on Noir Alley, like Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946).

N.S.: TCM has a nameless, faceless staffer, surely paid a fraction what it gives Red Eddie, who occasionally schedules The Killers.

Dark Passage probably ripped off the kindly, stunning stranger who helps out and falls in love with the condemned man from Jackson Budd, whose 1941 novel, A Convict Has Escaped had the same plot device. Budd’s story was filmed by Alberto Cavalcanti and Noel Langley as They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), later re-named I Became a Criminal, starring Trevor Howard, with Sally Gray as the kindhearted stranger.

(For my money, I’ll take Sally Gray over Betty Bacall. Gray was as talented, more beautiful, and had a shape to match her face. However, she suffered a massive breakdown in 1941. She came back briefly after The War, and then married an English nobleman for 50 years, happily tending to him and her garden, until he died at 100, and she joined him four years later, at 91.)

Dark Passage was “based on” the eponymous, 1946 novel by talented, pulp fiction writer, David Goodis, who obviously had read Budd’s novel, and who drank himself to death at 49.

They Made Me a Fugitive came out three months before Dark Passage.