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SPOILER ALERT!
Dark Passage is a strange movie, no getting around it, and in more ways than one. The first way it is strange is in its use of subjective camera in much of the first part of the movie. Subjective camera, which allows us to see exactly what some character in the movie sees, certainly has its place. However, it is normally used sparingly, reverting back to objective camera, the principal mode of filming, where we see what is going on from a vantage point that does not belong to anyone in the movie.
Furthermore, subjective camera is best used when the person whose point of view we share is motionless, or at least not moving in any significant way. For example, it is appropriate when a man is lying on an operating table about to undergo surgery, or when he is watching people who are unaware that they are being observed. In Rear Window (1954), James Stewart plays a man who is relatively immobile, owing to a broken leg, having nothing to do but watch his neighbors across the way. As a result, subjective camera is used extensively in this movie. At the same time, objective camera remains the primary mode of filming.
The worst possible use of subjective camera is in Lady in the Lake (1946), where the entire movie is filmed in subjective camera except for the introduction and some later commentary by Robert Montgomery in the role of Phillip Marlowe. He explains that this movie will allow people in the audience to experience it as if they were Phillip Marlowe. It does no such thing, because when Marlowe is moving around, we in the audience know we are not moving, especially when he is interacting physically with another person, as when he punches Lloyd Nolan or kisses Audrey Totter. The screen goes dark when he kisses her, so she is made to explain it by saying, “You close your eyes too, don’t you, darling?” In addition, it wears us out having so many people look directly into the camera, and therefore at us, when talking to Marlowe. The most unfortunate part about this movie is that after it was made, no one ever wanted to produce a remake. Maybe the novel by Raymond Chandler, on which the movie was based, is not one of his best, but filming a version in objective camera might have made for an enjoyable movie, had the prospect of such not been ruined by this one.
The motive for using subjective camera in the first part of Dark Passage is different from that of Lady in the Lake, which is to conceal the face of the protagonist, Vincent Parry. Later in the movie, he will have plastic surgery, after which we get to see his face, that of Humphrey Bogart. The movie is filmed primarily in the objective mode from that point on. Before the plastic surgery, we only hear the voice of Bogart. Objective camera is sometimes used even here, but only when Vincent’s face is not visible; otherwise, subjective camera is used. At one point before the surgery, we see what is supposed to be Vincent’s face in the newspaper, and it is quite different from that of Bogart. I don’t know to what extent a person’s face can be changed by plastic surgery, but it seems a stretch that his face could have been transformed that much.
The movie Seconds (1966) is more realistic, even if the kind of procedure used in the movie does put it in the category of science fiction. Arthur Hamiliton is played by John Randolph. He is bored with his life. He learns of a secret procedure that can give him a complete physical makeover, after which his death will be faked, and he can have a new identity, thereby giving him a second chance at life. He agrees to it, after which he becomes Antiochus Wilson, played by Rock Hudson. Admittedly, that is quite a change from Randolph to Hudson, but it is believable. There is a similarity in their eyes, for example.
Furthermore, by using two different actors, there was no need for the first part of Seconds to be filmed in subjective camera. Those who made Dark Passage could have found an actor who had more of a physical resemblance to Bogart, much in the way Jerry Lacy was used to play the Humphrey Bogart of Woody Allen’s imagination in Play It Again, Sam (1972). Such an actor could have played Vincent in the first part of the movie, with Bogart’s voice being dubbed in, and we would have accepted the change from plastic surgery more easily, as well as being spared the excessive use of subjective camera in the beginning.
When the movie begins, Vincent Parry is escaping from San Quentin. He manages to hitch a ride with a man named Baker, who becomes suspicious of Vincent. Then the radio reveals that Vincent is an escaped convict who murdered his wife three years ago. This leads to Vincent punching Baker several times in subjective camera, which smacks of a gimmick.
After knocking Baker out, he drags the body out of the car, removes Baker’s clothes, and puts them on himself. He grabs a rock, presumably to kill Baker, but then another car pulls up, and a woman steps out, whose name we later find out is Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall). She calls him “Vincent,” saying she wants to help him, telling him to get in her car.
As I said, this is a strange movie. She explains her presence by saying that she was out painting in the hills when she heard that he escaped. Then she figured this, and then she figured that, and that was how she was able to find him. Vincent doesn’t believe her explanation. We have a hard time believing it ourselves.
Then there is her motive. Why is she doing this for him? When they get to her apartment, she shows him a clipping from a newspaper of a letter she wrote to the editor during his trial, how she felt he was getting a raw deal. She reminds me of those goofy women that fall in love with men while they are on trial for murder, or later when they are in prison. In any event, we now have to accept that not only was she conveniently painting in the hills when Vincent broke out of prison, and that she happened to be listening to the radio, and that she was able to figure out where Vincent would be before the police did, but we must also accept that she was motivated to help him escape because of her interest in his trial three years ago. It turns out that she became interested in Vincent’s case because it reminded her of her father’s murder trial. She says, “I know he didn’t kill my stepmother.”
Now, let’s see. Why do you suppose the decision was made by those who wrote the script to make it be her stepmother instead of her mother who was murdered? Most likely, we would have expected Irene to be more concerned about the murder of her mother. Stepmothers, on the other hand, are disposable. They do not warrant the same amount of family feeling. In fact, Irene might have resented the fact that her father married her in the first place. Children often do. It is for a similar reason that fairy tales often speak of the wicked stepmother and not the wicked mother. So, Irene is allowed to take her father’s side when it is only her stepmother that was murdered without any misgivings on our part, whereas we would have been uncomfortable and suspicious had it been Irene’s real mother that was murdered.
Vincent asks her why she happened to be painting in the hills that morning. She answers:
When I woke up this morning, I found myself wondering how you were getting along. I don’t believe in fate or destiny, or any of those things because I know it wasn’t destined for my father to die in prison. But I guess it was something like fate to make me go out to Marin County to paint. Maybe it was simply because I was thinking of you.
Before they have this conversation, Irene gets a phone call from someone named Bob (Bruce Bennett), who is hoping for a date, but she says she is busy. Then she leaves to buy Vincent some new clothes. While she is out, a woman knocks on the door. Because Vincent has the record player on, that woman knows someone is in there, saying, “Irene, let me in.”
Vincent says to himself, “That’s Madge’s voice.” After she keeps insisting, he tells her through the door to go away.
This strikes us as bizarre. Vincent knows a woman named Madge (Agnes Moorehead), who happens to be a friend of Irene, whom he met just this morning? When Irene gets back with his new clothes, he tells her she had a caller, but he doesn’t mention that he knows it was Madge. Later on, after the conversation about Irene’s father, Vincent doesn’t say anything about Madge, but he does ask her who Bob is.
“He was engaged to somebody else,” Irene answers. “She hates him now, but at the same time....”
“She didn’t want anybody else to have him,” Vincent says, finishing her thought.
“How did you know?”
“I’ve known people like that.”
“You know more than that,” Irene surmises. “You know she was the woman who knocked at the door. The one who worked against you at the trial.”
Filling in the blanks, we have to conclude that Irene was at the trial, falling in love with Vincent and hoping he would be acquitted, and that was where she met Madge, who testified against him and got him convicted. On that basis, they became friends. After the trial, Madge and Bob fell in love and became engaged, but now she hates him. Bob started dating Irene, which made Madge hate him even more. And on that basis, Irene and Madge continue to be friends.
Vincent decides that Madge will keep coming back, so he leaves when it gets dark. He catches a taxicab. The cab driver, whose name is Sam (Tom D’Andrea), recognizes him from the newspapers. He thinks Vincent did kill his wife, but he doesn’t blame him. “I figure you slugged her with that ashtray because she made life miserable for you. I know how it is.”
Vincent appreciates the sympathy and understanding, but he denies killing her. Sam tells him he knows a back-alley plastic surgeon that can fix him up, so people won’t recognize him. Turns out that Irene slipped Vincent a thousand dollars without his knowing about it. (Adjusted for inflation, that would be equivalent to $14,500 today.) The face job will only cost a couple of hundred, so he can afford it.
In the meantime, Vincent goes to visit his friend George Fellsinger, a professional trumpet player. Through their conversation, we find out that Madge testified at the trial that Gertrude, Vincent’s wife, said, “Vincent killed me.” That’s about as realistic as when the title character of Agamemnon announces offstage, “Ah me, I have been struck a mortal blow.”
George says that Gertrude wouldn’t have done that. He says it was Madge who framed Vincent because she was in love with him, and when she couldn’t have him, she got revenge by telling that story on the witness stand.
Vincent leaves George’s apartment and has the plastic surgeon give him a new face. Then, all bandaged up, he goes back to stay with George until his face has healed. But when he enters the apartment, George is lying dead on the floor, having been killed by being struck with his own trumpet. The police know that George was a friend of his, and when they come to ask questions, they will think Vincent killed him, especially since he left his fingerprints on the trumpet.
He has only one place to go now, and that is back to Irene’s. Unfortunately, he already dismissed Sam, the cab driver, so he has to walk all the way, or rather, climb, since this is San Francisco. But wouldn’t you know it? As he is about to reach Irene’s apartment, he sees Baker’s car. You remember him, don’t you, the guy Vincent had to beat up at the beginning of this movie? Well, here he is again.
Anyway, Vincent faints right after pushing the button to Irene’s apartment. She finds him passed out and carries him up to her apartment. I guess Irene is stronger than she looks.
The plan now is for Vincent to stay with Irene until the bandages are ready to come off. One night Bob calls for a date, and she accepts, saying Vincent can hide in the bedroom when Bob arrives. But then Madge shows up before Bob gets there.
Up till now, this movie has merely been farfetched. This section with Bob, however, is logically incoherent. Bob and Madge start arguing in front of Irene, with Bob saying that Madge is the reason Vincent murdered his wife. “Madge pestered him,” he says, “kept after him till she had a hold on him. That’s why he killed his wife, to get her out of the way.”
And Bob thinks he knows this how? He admits that he never met Vincent Parry. Yet he is sure that Madge made Vicent fall in love with her, causing him to kill his wife so he could be with Madge from then on. Did Bob learn this from Irene? No. Irene did not meet Madge until the trial, well after all this was supposed to have happened, and she didn’t even meet Vincent until after his escape from San Quentin. As for Madge, she denies what Bob is saying.
Bob continues his accusation:
Parry didn't have the brains to know it, but you drove him to it. He has no brains, or he wouldn’t have killed Fellsinger. Wouldn’t have come to Frisco in the first place. Now he’ll get the gas chamber.
So, according to Bob, Vincent not only killed Gertrude, his wife, but also his friend, George Fellsinger.
Madge says she’s afraid that Vincent will try to kill her next because she testified against him at his trial, and now he hates her.
Bob replies, “I never met Parry, but I know psychologically, he’s no killer.”
Huh? Bob thinks Vincent killed Gertrude, and he thinks Vincent killed George, yet Bob is certain that Vincent is no killer, psychologically speaking, even though he never met him, so Madge has nothing to worry about.
Madge denies that Vincent ever had anything to do with her. She says, “Somebody lied to you.”
Bob replies, “Gert wasn’t a liar. She was a lot of other things, but not a liar.”
So, Bob never met Vincent, but he knew Gertrude well enough to know she wasn’t a liar. I guess we could assume that Bob and Gertrude were having an affair, and one night during a little pillow talk, she told Bob that Vincent and Madge were in love. That right there could have been a lie, an attempt to justify her having an affair with Bob. Then, after Gertrude was murdered and Vincent was convicted, Bob and Madge fell in love and decided to get married. But they had a falling out, and Bob, having met Irene through Madge, started dating Irene.
I’m only assuming Bob and Gertrude had an affair, however, in order to make sense of how he knew her but not Vincent, her husband, but this is not confirmed through any of the dialogue. And my assumption is doubtful, anyway, because Bob insists that Gertrude was not a liar, even though a woman has to lie to her husband when she cheats on him.
Eventually it comes out that a man was in Irene’s apartment the other day when Madge knocked on the door. Irene tells Bob the man was her new boyfriend, breaking up with Bob and removing him from the rest of the picture. She also tells Madge she doesn’t want to see her anymore either. So, let’s try to forget about all that nonsense Bob was talking about so we can get back to the parts of this movie that are only farfetched, like, for instance, the fact that Baker is outside, sitting in his parked convertible, looking up at Irene’s apartment.
Once the bandages come off, Vincent says goodbye to Irene, not wanting her to get mixed up in his problems. He says he intends to find out who the real killer is so he can clear himself. This is a common plot point in a movie, when a man wrongfully accused must evade the police long enough to find out who the real killer is and with enough evidence to exonerate himself. I have never heard of anyone doing that in real life, but we’ll revisit this point later.
Anyway, no sooner does Vincent leave than he runs into a suspicious detective. He manages to get away from him and rent a room at a hotel, but then Baker shows up holding a .38. He says he regained consciousness in time to see Irene’s license plate, by which he found out where she lived and that she is a rich woman. He then followed Vincent the night he left in a taxi, so he even knows about the facelift. He wants Vincent to get Irene to give him $60,000.
Vincent agrees, and they start driving back to Irene’s. It turns out that Baker did time in San Quentin himself, where he learned a lot of things. He tells Vincent where he can get identification papers in Benton, Arizona before he leaves the country.
Vincent gets the drop on Baker and finds out there was another car that followed him the night he took the taxi. From the description of the car, a bright-orange convertible coupe, Vincent now knows who killed Gertrude and George. There is another struggle, and Baker accidentally falls over a cliff.
Needless to say, the orange car belongs to Madge. He goes over to Madge’s apartment, claiming to be a friend of Bob. Eventually, she realizes he is actually Vincent. Now, for the most part, this movie has been nothing like The Maltese Falcon (1941), but this scene with Vincent and Madge invites comparison to the final scene in that movie between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy. And even though The Maltese Falcon is a much better movie than Dark Passage, and even though this latter film has been farfetched and even illogical up to this point, it is nevertheless more realistic in this scene than the movie about the black bird.
As you may remember, in the final scene of The Maltese Falcon, Sam tells Brigid that he has figured out that she killed his partner Miles Archer, and that she is going to have to “take the fall,” meaning that she will be the one who has to take the blame for that murder. Otherwise, Sam will end up having to go to prison. In this scene in Dark Passage, Vincent tells Madge that he has figured out that she killed Gertrude. Then he concluded that she killed George because that would further incriminate Vincent, for which he will get the gas chamber. He has it all written down on a piece of paper, which he will give to the police, saying that she will be the one who has to go to prison.
In The Maltese Falcon, Brigid admits to killing Miles, and when the police detectives show up, Sam turns her over to them. Like a meek little lamb, she goes with them, accepting her fate without a word of protest. In Dark Passage, however, Madge says to Vincent exactly what Brigid should have said to Sam, “That’s no evidence. That’s just the way you figure it.”
To irritate Vincent even more, Madge defiantly admits to killing Gertrude and George. But when Vincent asks if she will tell that to the police, she smirks and says, “No.” In The Maltese Falcon, after Brigid admits to Sam she killed Miles, she acts as if that confession seals her fate. In this scene in Dark Passage, Madge knows, as Brigid should have known, that she can deny ever having admitted anything to Vincent. Vincent realizes that she is right, that the police will not take his word for all this. And so it is that Dark Passage is more believable here than was the corresponding scene in The Maltese Falcon.
His plan having been frustrated, Vincent becomes threatening, wanting to kill her. In her attempt to get away from him, she pushes up against a picture window, crashes through it, and plunges to her death from her high-rise apartment several floors up. So, I guess you might say that she did end up taking the fall.
The reasonable thing for him to do at this point is take the elevator down to the first floor. But he hears people talking about what happened, and he decides he must avoid them, as if they would think he pushed the woman out the window. Instead, he goes up to the roof and then climbs down what must be at least ten flights of fire escape. But that’s all right, because nobody notices.
He makes it to the bus station and buys a ticket for Benton, Arizona, the place where Baker said he could get a passport. He calls Irene on a payphone and tells her he is going to Paita, Peru. While he is on the phone, a policeman comes in and starts talking to the man selling bus tickets. We don’t get to hear what the policeman is looking for, we only hear the man selling tickets say, “I’ll keep my eyes peeled.” Peeled for what? Vincent Parry? No problem. He’s had a face lift.
Anyway, with the policeman standing right outside the phone booth, we wonder if Vincent will have any trouble getting past him and the man selling tickets. Well, I guess we can go on right on wondering because all of a sudden, we see Vincent sitting on the bus.
Then comes the happy ending, where Irene finds Vincent in a nightclub in Paita.
I mentioned earlier that the plot of the wronged man, who must evade the police long enough to discover who the real killer is and find enough evidence to incriminate him while exonerating himself, is a common one. And in every other movie I can think of, this wronged man does exactly that, even though nothing like that ever happens in real life. This movie is the exception. Vincent is still wanted for murdering Gertrude and George, and we can now add Madge to this list of people he is supposed to have killed. The police might even be able to tie him to Baker’s death. In a strange way, the fact that he has been unable to clear himself makes this movie, as farfetched and illogical as it is, more realistic.