Dark Passage (1947)

Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, a convicted murder who has just escaped San Quentin Prison. Lauren Bacall is Irene Jansen, a woman interested in his case who shelters him. Vincent, believing he was framed, is desperate not to be sent back to prison so he enlists the help of a plastic surgeon to change his appearance.

This was a big deal for the studio because they were shelling out the money for Humphrey Bogart to star in this movie, but Vincent didn't look like Humphrey Bogart until after his surgery - meaning Bogart's face doesn't even appear on screen until the last third of the movie. The first two thirds we just see his hands and a first-person point of view followed by a brief time with his face in bandages.

First-person (or subjective) camera work was still rather exotic at the time. In today's context though, it feels like a video game. Another interesting filming choice was that this movie was shot on location in San Francisco. It's refreshing when compared to all the obviously studio set films of this era - even with the driving scenes clearly being in front of a screen.

As for the story, it's limited by the fact that Vincent is hiding and has nowhere else to go. Yet even in a confined plot Bacall and Bogart play off each other wonderfully. Dark Passage was the third out of the four on-screen partnerships between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and just like the rest, it makes you wish there had been more than four.

Rating: 3/5
Recommended for: Bacall/Bogie fans who wonder what plastic surgery was like in the 40's

Key Largo (1948)

The John Huston-directed Key Largo is a rather simple and straight forward film noir. Humphrey Bogart stars as WWII veteran Frank McCloud. McCloud has stopped in Key Largo to pay his respects to a deceased comrade's family which includes the man's widow Nora, played by Lauren Bacall, and his father, as done by Lionel Barrymore. The hotel the two run has been taken over by fugitive gangsters awaiting a transaction. Predictably enough, as a hurricane brews outside, tempers brew inside. Lead gangster Johnny Rocco's abuses build up and someone has to stand up to him. Frank McCloud is not really interested in be that someone, regardless of him being the most likely candidate.

McCloud is archetypical Bogart hero who has moved on and is attempting to live the rest of his life in peace. And of course there's a woman and circumstances beyond his control trying to drag him back into the fray. It's is not the most exciting of the Bogart/Bacall on-screen partnerships, but it's their last and they work together well. The film itself is a confined tension builder akin to 12 Angry Men but falls just short of that same intensity. That might be due to story pacing which is a little on the slow side. It's a great cast though. Everyone is clearly committed and pulling their weight. So overall, not the best film ever but not a bad one at all.

Rating: 3/5
Recommended for: Any adult who is hankering for some film-noir and has one hundred minutes to spare.

Extended Review: The last twenty minutes or so finds Frank McCloud on a boat with bad guys. Immediately I found myself wondering if I had inadvertently switched over to To Have and Have Not, which has Bogart's character on a boat... trying to escape from bad guys. It seemed too uncanny to call a coincidence. A little research reveals the film was incredibly loosely based on a Maxwell Anderson play. Since they were re-writing everything anyway, when it came time to make up the ending they used the unusable boat shootout from... To Have and Have Not. Well, it worked.