Word: bogarting
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...Dark Passage. Humphrey Bogart, a fugitive from injustice, escapes everything but Lauren Bacall (TIME, Sept...
...Dark Passage. Humphrey Bogart, a fugitive from injustice, escapes everything except Lauren Bacall (TIME, Sept...
Eventually, the camera gazes up at a sinister doctor (Housely Stevenson) who proposes to revise Bogart's face beyond the Law's recognition. For several reels more, the hero is visible only as an actor staging efficient silhouettes in a dark suit, his head masked in a glaring white, highly photogenic bandage. When at last this surrealist cocoon is peeled off to reveal nothing but Bogart, it is bound to be a little anticlimactic-but not too much. Bogart knows his way perfectly around this sort of plot. He finds out who murdered his wife and his best...
Quite aside from Mr. Bogart's high-skilled labor, The Dark Passage has the benefit of an unusually good script and direction by Delmer Daves, who also wrote and directed another unconventional thriller, The Red House (TIME, Feb. 17). Daves's first-person-singular manipulation of the camera profits by Robert Montgomery's good pioneering in Lady in the Lake (TIME, Jan. 27). Director Daves also has a sensitive hand with atmosphere and mood: there is a beautiful outdoor scene, for instance, in which the exhausted, bandaged Bogart, like a figure in a nightmare, staggers through...
...type (Agnes Moorehead, who usually plays embittered spinsters, does handsomely in a sexy role). The picture is greatly enriched through minor characters and minor incidents. As added frights, the doctor and the crook are such well-conceived, well-played parts that they practically steal the show. And just as Bogart is about ready to try for his final getaway, the question of whether two cops in a bus terminal are oblivious of him or waiting for him adds a realistic kind of suspense that is too seldom used in movies. This thriller is not quite up to the best Hitchcock...