Drugstore.com Coupons
Bogart meets a cab driver (Tom D'Andrea), who sets him up with a plastic surgeon (Houseley Stevenson) to make him look like someone not on the Most Wanted list. Bogart then goes about trying to find the real murderer, a task made more difficult by the additional killing of Bogart's best friend, Rory Mallinson.
Meanwhile, Bacall tries to secure quality time with Bogie, by breaking off relationships with her would-be boyfriend Bruce Bennett and the thoroughly unpleasant (and nosy) Agnes Moorehead.
How others will see it. One of four films that Bogart and Bacall made during the 1940s, Dark Passage again places Bogart in comfortable territory: a crime drama. The movie is enjoyable despite its bogus characters and plot (more on this later), and classic movie fans will relish every minute. Well photographed and directed, but still the weakest of the films made together by the married couple.
How I felt about it. The first half of the movie is strange. We don't see Bogart's face until he has had the plastic surgery. Instead, we see things through the perspective of Bogart, which means all the other characters look directly at the camera and speak to it as if it were Humphrey Bogart. Thus, we have half a Bogart film without Bogart, except as a voiceover, even though his character dominates virtually scene.
But the biggest problem Dark Passage has is the motivation of its characters. Bacall is willing to ruin her life to spend it with Bogart, a convicted murderer she hardly knows. It is true that given sufficient publicity, serial killers receive marriage proposals in prison from mentally disturbed women. But Bacall is not disturbed, and she goes to remarkable lengths on his behalf. She even believes his improbable stories concerning the deaths of Mallinson and Moorehead.
It is equally unlikely that a cab driver who has identified Bogart as an escaped convicted murderer would befriend him and set him up with a plastic surgeon he happens to be good friends with. And the plastic surgeon would cheerfully agree to rework Bogart's face instead of reporting him to the police. I guess none of these people (Bacall, Mallinson, D'Andrea, Stevenson) are worried about getting sent to prison for ten years for helping a fugitive.
Most ridiculous of all, though, is Moorehead's character. She's so discordant that it seems preposterous that either Bacall or Bennett (or anyone else) would have anything to do with her. We are also expected to believe that she is so jealous of Bogart that she is willing to kill people just so that they can't have him. Are we really to believe that Moorehead stakes out Bacall's condo, then follows Bogart to Mallinson's place, waits until Bogart leaves, then murders Mallinson, all this time without calling the police to claim a $5,000 reward?
Meanwhile, Bogart becomes the first man to have extensive plastic surgery without receiving any stitches. Bogart's character tells more lies than a con man looking for a score. To get around the Production Code, which requires punishment for evil-doers, the convenient deaths of Clifton Young and Moorehead are accidents, instead of murders by Bogart. But they had it coming to them, anyhow.