DARK PASSAGE (1947)

SARA: This summer we're adding a bunch of films noir to our movie watching diet with TCM's Summer of Darkness.  Turner Classic Movies is showing over a hundred noirs this June and July, some of them rare or newly restored.  That sounds awesome!  Unfortunately we have no money, so we have no TCM.  They've also prepared an online film course (Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir) in partnership with Ball State University that's free to take, and as a really classy gesture the course suggests freely available public domain films that support the syllabus.  We'll be following along and supplementing what we can find on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime with our local library's collection.  You can join the course at any time; sign up at http://summerofdarkness.tcm.com/.  You can also see the film schedule there, buy tickets for Fathom Events screenings of DOUBLE INDEMNITY, and... buy fedoras?  Yeah, you can buy fedoras.  If you're a Twitter user they want you to use #NoirSummer.

We started out with DARK PASSAGE, one of the TCM "San Francisco Noir" selections.  If you're confused about which Dark Whatever you've seen and which you haven't, this is "the one with the first third of the movie in Bogart's POV".  You don't actually see the star's face until over an hour into the movie; the first third is shot almost entirely from his perspective.  The obvious question is: does this work?

Have you seen this killer? Because we haven't.

My opinion is "eh, not so much."  The film vocabulary we're accustomed to varies the kind of shot.  I'm not saying that's the only kind of vocabulary that can work (Western music's chord structures aren't the only way to make music, after all), but it's certainly what we're used to and without it, I really felt the first third of the film dragged.  As a modern viewer the similarity to a video game with a really elaborate conversation tree was hard to ignore, and there's a real awkwardness to the framing when the camera looks at people, not quite the way a human being looks at them, but full on eye contact and always the same distance away.  So you need me to collect how many plants for you so you can make the medicine to sell in the big city so you'll give me your father's sword so I can save everybody in this town including you?

FALLOUT 3 was in development for a really long time.

WALLACE: I was hoping Humphrey Bogart would activate the cheat codes and begin a GRAND THEFT AUTO-style killing spree. There's nothing wrong with DARK PASSAGE that you couldn't fix with a scene of Bogie (or Lauren Bacall, for that) shooting a police helicopter out of the sky with a rocket-propelled grenade. But we haven't really discussed the movie's actual plot. Here's what IMDB seems to think this movie is about:

"A man convicted of murdering his wife escapes from prison and works with a woman to try and prove his innocence."

Do you think that's accurate?

SARA:  Uh, technically?  I mean, isn't that at least 5% of all movies?  I promise you, if you were trying to figure out if you've seen this movie before, that will not help you.  Honestly, does the plot even matter? (Does the plot ever really matter in a noir?  I swear I was stone cold sober through OUT OF THE PAST and if you offered me a million dollars if I could tell you what happened in the last third of that movie we'd still have a mortgage.)

WALLACE: This isn't my first encounter with DARK PASSAGE. I discovered Bogart not long after high school and it was love at first site. Unfortunately, THE BIG SLEEP, KEY LARGO and THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE were some goddamn tough acts to follow. I like DARK PASSAGE more now than when I first saw it, but it's definitely one of Bogart's lesser films. Part of the problem is its shtick — specifically the first-person POV element from the first act — functions almost like anti-drama. The first exchange between characters takes place in front of a rear-projection screen with one of the actors (Clifton Young) speaking directly to the camera lens for almost five minutes. Bogart's voice can be heard, but it's clear from the start that he's not really in the scene.

The Humphrey Bogart Simulator (bourbon sold separately).

SARA: But in a way that's kind of an interesting aspect to the movie.  For the first third the camera is restricted to this very extreme POV business, and in the second third he's trapped under a set of claustrophobic bandages and unable to speak.  We as the audience can't really get a handle on his character but might that not be a little on purpose?  I mean, maybe the video game thing isn't just facile; one reason video games put you in that perspective and often even have silent protagonists is that you're supposed to put yourself into the game.  This movie thinks we're going to automatically be so much on Bogie's side that he doesn't even tell us that he's escaped to clear his name and find his wife's killer until two thirds of the way in!  And everybody including at least one of the antagonists roots for the guy, gives him aid and comfort and information, which is odd because he's an escaped murderer and the newspaper has brought out their WAR font to give updates on him that actually go past the fold because they ran out of screamin' room. Maybe it's a bit of a fantasy. Certainly the ending is.

WALLACE: Hollywood seems to have leaned some lessons from this movie. LADY IN THE LAKE was released that same year and was a lot more audacious: The entire movie was shot from star Robert Montgomery's point of view, but the execution renders it almost unwatchable. DARK PASSAGE wisely split this gimmick into several acts. When Bogie's seen during the first act, it's as a shadowy figure. After his plastic surgery he becomes a more physical presence ... but temporarily loses his voice. Bogart's character is assembled piece by piece like Frankenstein's monster, but he never really gels as a character. He remains little more than a cipher for the audience.

Despite its artifice, the POV "fight" between Bogart and Clifton Young at the start of the movie works fairly well, though. It's a fakey as a Godzilla costume under florescent light, but it's also cramped and intimate in all the right ways. Had the gimmick ended there it would probably be better remembered today.

DARK PASSAGE: The first film shot entirely in Persecution Vision!

SARA: I do wonder what it would have been like to see it when it was released - now we're very accustomed to the technique and if anything this example is strange because it isn't filmed in Motion Sickness Vision.  At the time it was a lot more audacious.

Talking about the rest of the movie feels a little bit like "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"  There's a lot of good here that isn't related to the camera gimmicks, though.  Once Bogie actually does get to do some acting I think it's great stuff; the scene with the cop in the diner works like gangbusters.  That's an actor who didn't get a lot of opportunities to play tentative and afraid, but he really sells it there.

The larger plot is a little thin on the ground that I kept getting excited about ideas I had that would have been really good, y'all, all "well maybe it's going to do THIS?!" or "oh maybe she's IN ON IT!" because there's just not a lot of there there and you want to fill in with something more interesting or less far fetched.  How on earth does Bacall even know Bob and Madge?  Swinger's party?  Her character never really had a lot to do; she's in the film a lot but only in a few scenes does she get anything to work with.  I really wanted to see more of what made her tick, since the script and direction doesn't play it up but she's really just one of those creepy women who marry serial killers on Death Row, right?

And wait, am I supposed to believe Agnes Moorehead beat a full grown man to death with a trumpet?

WALLACE: Agnes Moorehead can do anything she likes, as far as I'm concerned. I didn't get this MARGO LANE 4 LIFE tattoo for nothing.

It's going to be hard to discuss the end of this movie because it has more than one. I'm not sure that DARK PASSAGE is a full-blooded noir thanks to its unwillingness to stick the landing. Had the credits rolled after Moorehead tosses herself out of her apartment window, I'd happily file this movie in the noir drawer. THAT ending would have delivered all the nihilistic uncertainty you expect from the genre: Not only was Bogart's new cover blown, but now he's wanted for a second murder he didn't commit. THE END.

Instead, we get a tacked-on escape scene that serves no real purpose, followed by the "Happily Ever After" denouement in Peru.

Agnes Moorehead? More like Agnes MOREDEAD. Amiright? Hello?

SARA: Hey, how do those cars know they're supposed to park diagonally there?  Did the first guy do it and everybody else figured he knew what he was doing?

I want to see three days after the end of the movie, when they've found out that Bogie farts in his sleep and Bacall is a mean drunk but they're stuck there for another week until the next plane out.  "I liked you better when you couldn't talk!"  "Yeah, well I liked you better when you were stalking me throughout my trial and imprisonment, QUIETLY!"

Lots of style to talk about, by the way.  I love the oppressive ceilings everywhere, and once you pointed out that there are vertical "bars" everywhere (the suits, everything Bacall wears, the Golden Gate Bridge, the bannisters on the stairs, etc.) I couldn't stop seeing it.

WALLACE: It's a claustrophobic film, for sure. Even the outdoor sequences are constructed in a way that hems in the characters. For example: The shot at the start of the film that show's Bogart's character fleeing the barrel. He appears to be running away, but the edge of the barrel around the frame of the picture suggests he's still a prisoner. Which is another reason that THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION ending doesn't work for me ... it betrays the film's overall message.

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered."

SARA: It really skirts the rules, too.  Yeah, he might have been innocent of killing his wife, but he sure was guilty of breaking out of prison, assaulting people, endangering a police officer doing his duty, fake ID...  how "bad" do you have to be under the Code to have to be punished by the end of a movie?

Grounding the film in the geography of San Francisco was nice, by the way.  When you've got such a fantastical construction as a Plastic Surgery Plot it helps to have a concrete location; there are some great shots in this that are wide open and specific in location but still claustrophobic.  I'm thinking of the cable car scenes and the one where he stands at a huge wide intersection but still totally hemmed in.  And of course the scene on the bridge with the roadblock.

WALLACE: While some of the production design was cliché (but the good kind of cliché) this is definitely a movie designed with the audience’s perspective in mind. Even after it drops the first-person perspective, it’s still a movie that treats the viewer like a … well, not a participant, exactly. Maybe a passenger?

SARA: Agreed, and I think that's what ultimately somewhat saved it from being just a gimmick piece.  I'd say it wasn't entirely successful but I liked it well enough.

So, verdict: interesting film, worth watching, not the best example of anything in particular.