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Dark Passage 
DVD Cover Directed by
Delmer Daves Produced by
Jerry Wald Written by
Story: David Goodis Screenplay: Delmer Daves Starring
Humphrey Bogart Lauren Bacall Agnes Moorehead Music by
Franz Waxman Cinematography
Sidney Hickox Distributed by
Warner Bros. Release
date(s) September 5, 1947 (U.S.A.) Running time 106 minutes Country
United States Language
English Dark Passage (1947) is a Warner Bros. film noir directed by Delmer Daves and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The film is based on the novel of the same name by David Goodis. It was the third of four films real-life couple Bacall and Bogart made together.[1]
Contents[]
Convicted murderer Vincent Parry (Bogart) escapes from San Quentin prison and is picked up and sheltered by Irene Jansen (Bacall), an artist with an interest in his case.
Helped by a friendly cabbie, Sam (Tom D'Andrea), Parry gets a new face from a plastic surgeon thereby enabling him to dodge the authorities and find his wife's real murderer.
He has difficulty staying hidden at Irene's because Madge Rapf (Agnes Moorehead), the spiteful woman whose testimony sent him up to prison, keeps stopping by and a blackmailer named Baker tries to extort money from Irene. The film's climax features the killer realizing the true identity of the man behind the face.
[edit] Background
Lauren Bacall as Irene Jansen and Humphrey Bogart as Vincent Perry.
Robert Montgomery had released the film Lady in the Lake a year earlier, and it was the first major film that used the "subjective camera technique" in which the viewer sees the action through the protagonist's eyes. Yet, film critic Hal Erikson believes Dark Passage does a better job at using this point-of-view technique, writing, "The first hour or so of Dark Passage does the same thing--and the results are far more successful than anything seen in Montgomery's film."[2]
Franz Waxman's main title music for this movie is the same theme used in To Have and Have Not (1944).
Parts of the movie were filmed on location in San Francisco, California, including the cable car system. An error in the film has Bogart getting on an O'Farrell, Jones, and Hyde cable car but leaving a Powell Street car at Market Street, a trip which was not possible until ten years later when the two lines were combined into the Powell–Hyde line. The diner was "Harry's Wagon" at 1921 Post Street, a long-closed diner in the Fillmore District of San Francisco.
