A Film Canon

One of the most unusual contributions to the 1940s noir cycle, Dark Passage is divided into three relatively self-contained acts. The first is shot entirely from the point-of-view of escaped convict Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart), as he finds himself taken in by Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall), a woman who was associated with his trial, and passed on to a rogue plastic surgeon; the second takes place in the immediate aftermath of an operation that leaves his head swathed in bandages, and largely reduces his presence to occasional streams of consciousness; the third witnesses his recovery and subsequent resolution of the entrapment that led to his conviction. Most immediately, this defamiliarises the rapport between Bogart and Bacall - epitomised by the moment at which she removes his bandages - while simultaneously suggesting that that rapport has become sufficiently entrenched, or iconic, to be capable of the various forms of playful plasticity and transference that occur throughout the film. However, this disorientation speaks to a wider aesthetic, informing a pervasive, deliberate atonality evident in the oblique, ambiguous relation between characters, as well as the abrupt shifts in mood and direction; that is, a vertiginous narrative spiral whose most poetic corollary is the San Francisco cityscape itself, which forms the common denominator between the three acts. It feels as if Bogart is constantly running up hills and staircases, for the sake of postponing a vertiginous fall that is beautifully crystallised in two key episodes - his struggle with a petty criminal on the cliff beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, and his confrontation with a femme fatale that culminates with an unexpected ten-storey plummet. The result is a peculiarly sombre pessimism, encapsulated in the lonely, nocturnal professions (cab driver, night watchman, diner cook) encountered on this circuitous voyage, and which seem to constitute the city's population.