Word: camera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Offered a friendly hand in Rome: Pius XII. But the air was so thick with ecclesiastical greetings when a camera clicked that the occasion came out bearing a remarkable resemblance to an unrehearsed square dance...
With the possible exception of Margaret O'Brien, Joan Caulfield is Hollywood's most sexless female luminary. Whatever she lacks in personal appeal she also lacks in acting prowess and case in front of a camera, all of which makes her presence in "Welcome Stranger" highly depressing to Bing Crosby-Barry Fitzgerald purists. There is, however, enough of Crosby at his best to make the picture melodious and entertaining, while Fitzgerald commendably limits his concessions to quaintness, a restraint which keeps "Welcome Stranger," for the most part, from waxing mawkish...
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...
...Dark Passage (Warner) builds up a remarkably long and effective delayed entrance for its star, Humphrey Bogart. During the first several reels, the camera-along with the audience-sees the world through the hero's eyes: rolling downhill in a barrel (he is a convict making a break); watching a cop's hand paw dangerously into his hideout in Lauren Bacall's auto (he is a convict getting a break); watching Miss Bacall register lovelight as she looks into the lens (a break cinemaddicts have had before...
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...