Dark Passage

Dark Passage is a bit of an enigma. It is a stupid movie full of difficult to swallow plot holes, a capable Noir film built on the back of a self-indulgent gimmick, and a compelling mystery story with enough twists and turns to keep most viewers’ attention til the bitter end, all rolled up into one. It is both a good movie and a bad movie at the same time and, as such, is hard to review properly.

The movie’s opening is what it is probably best known and remembered for. We follow a prison escapee on his path southward, across the Golden Gate bridge and into San Francisco, all shot from the escapee’s perspective. This isn’t perfect point of view camera work. Cheats are still used to make certain important characters and moments appear more clear to the audience and more cinematic in their construction, typically by shifting the camera’s perspective to something that conveys a sort of emotional truth of the point of view character’s perspective despite it not reflecting the reality of what he could see. This concept is carried forward until around the midway point of the movie, after which cosmetic surgery changes the main character’s appearance, cleverly making it so that the only face the audience ever sees is the “new” visage of our protagonist.

For some, this opening comes across as an arthouse gimmick but in my opinion that is a tad harsh. This deviation from normal filmic language actually works fairly well. Extended point of view shots very rarely do what the filmmaker intends, making you feel like it’s you in the middle of the action, and Dark Passage is no exception. However, the gimmick does work in letting us feel the sense of panic, confusion, fear, and trepidation as he sneaks his way around the city trying to figure out what to do next. I give the filmmakers full credit for taking the risk and think it is one of the more brilliant things the movie does.

If I were to throw bricks at this opening, my main issue is actually that it goes on for too long. While the opening can effectively put the viewer into the paranoid shoes of the escapee, the longer we sit in that point of view the less it effectively maintains that illusion. I’m not sure how feasible, given the construction of the plot, it would have been to move the face change earlier in the story, but for the movie’s overall pacing, the lengthy use of the alternative framing takes a neat film making trick and extends it beyond the point that some viewers can stomach it.

There is more to the movie than its opening idea, even if it extends to almost half the runtime. Unfortunately, where the movie really gets dumb is not in this experimental opening but in the main plot itself. Reminiscent of The Fugitive, our escaped protagonist is an innocent man and eventually plans to use his new found freedom as a way to prove they got the wrong guy. This sets up a whole series of events that don’t really make any sense if you stop to think about them. A taxi driver that clearly identifies the main character as a murderer not only chooses not to turn him in but offers to help him change his identity, for no justifiable reason. A romance begins forming out of the flimsiest of bases and circumstances. A policeman is oddly insistent about the absence of a raincoat. A con man tries to strong arm someone he believes to be a dangerous killer, apparently never considering the risks. Two people fight because one of them does not believe in killing, only to end up killing the other man during the fight.

Perhaps the worst offender is at the end, in which the main character tries to get a confession out of the real murderer, but this is the 1940s so he can’t have a hidden recording device to catch them slipping up and admitting they did it. The technology wasn’t there, at least not for civilians. The real killer would have to actually go and turn themselves into the police, something they would never do in a million years. So this big climactic moment in which the real killer is revealed is undercut by our hero just badgering this person over and over to do the right thing and turn themselves in, and the murderer rightly pointing out they have no reason to do this and they are perfectly happy not being in jail. It is just so bizarre.

That being said, all of that becomes remarkably easy to ignore if you just give yourself up to the movie. The noir style and almost Hitchcockian ability to utilize the camera to squeeze maximal tension out of each and every suspenseful moment really brings you along for a wild ride. Despite all the strange contrivances that are necessary to set everything in motion, the actual solving of the mystery of the murder is quite fun. It is no Agatha Christie novel, but it’s good enough to have kept my interest piqued for the majority of the run time. Bogart and Bacall sizzle, as usual, and the bantering nature of the dialogue brings a fun energy to much of the piece. It can even have small moments of well crafted comedy to help break up the dark tone.

That is what is so intriguing and mystifying about Dark Passage. It is a perfectly riveting noir thriller with more holes than swiss cheese. It offers an engrossing, tension-riddled tour of old San Francisco akin to Vertigo, but with a much stupider plot and a slightly less deft directorial touch. It is fun and compelling, experimental and weird, bafflingly and badly written, all at the same time. Every piece of sharp dialogue and tense acting is then undercut by some gaping plot hole that is too obvious to ignore. The movie shows some genuine flashes of brilliance but can’t maintain that level throughout. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it worth watching? Yes to all three, probably.

Would Recommend: If you love a Bogart and Bacall team up, or you love movies about San Francisco.

Would Not Recommend: If you are a stickler for logical plots and tightly written narratives.