“Dark Passage”, Bogie and Bacall’s poetic dreamscape where everything becomes possible

Bogie is on the run, having just escaped prison after he was framed for the murder of his wife, and Bacall comes to his rescue, her belief in his innocence rooted in her own family history. But for the first third of the film we can hear Bogart’s voice, but we can’t see his face. These early scenes are shot with subjective camerawork, as though through his eyes. We see what he would see. After a plastic surgery, in order to avoid being recognised by the police, his familiar face finally emerges from underneath the bandages. And the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall when they look into each other’s eyes is obvious. We’ve seen it before. But whereas in the first two films they did together, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, the electricity between them was palpable on screen, marked by erotic tension and the game of seduction, here it is gentleness and tenderness that prevail, as Bertrand Tavernier notes in his magnificent book Amis Américains. “The next few years were the happiest of my life – I was really on a cloud,” is how Lauren Bacall recounted that period of her life (they had just married when they filmed Dark Passage).

It is the tender relationship between Bogie (as Vincent Parry) and Bacall (as landscape painter Irene Jansen) that carries the film, and we believe it. “Few films give the viewer such a strong impression of moving within a waking dream,” Tavernier writes. “Instead of a sham of verisimilitude, Daves prefers a plunge into the uncanny, into a poetic dreamscape where everything becomes possible, and the most improbable encounters and coincidences seem perfectly natural — even a happy ending (invented by Daves and a serious departure from genre conventions) that borders on a fairy tale. This magnificent ending was celebrated by the Surrealists, who saw it as a perfect illustration of the triumph of L’Amour fou. Far from dwelling on darkness, despair, and pessimism, as is typical of the genre, Daves compensates for each of his hero’s misfortunes with a stroke of fabulous luck (he has no neutral encounters; each one is either catastrophic or providential).”

The city of San Francisco, the hometown of Delmer Daves, offers the perfect setting not for the action, but especially for the characters and their state of mind. You can see and feel how the steely hills, steep staircases and shaded passages of the city tighten in on Vincent, a maze he can not escape, and how even Irene’s apartment (his hideout), although elegantly spacious and flooded with natural light, becomes claustrophobic. He has to get out, even if it means going away from Irene as well. But Delmer Daves is a romantic, “one of the most romantic American filmmakers”, Tavernier insisted, and Vincent manages to prevail and come out on top after his assorted setbacks. He gets Irene, too, and that’s the fairy tale element, the most unconventional one for film noir, that Daves plays with.

This was Bogart and Bacall’s third film together and if you watch these three movies in chronological order, it’s like you watch their relationship evolve and grow and deepen on screen. By any means, I don’t want to take anything away from the individuality of each film, its characters and narrative authenticity, but Bogie and Bacall’s power of seduction for the audiences was so huge that screenwriters, directors and especially producers all took that into consideration when they paired them together on screen. All except Howard Hawks on their debut feature, To Have and Have Not, which was also Lauren Bacall’s first role. And what a memorable role it was! She turned out to be the perfect partner for Humphrey Bogart. At the tender age of 19, she could crack wise with Bogie, measure up to his personality and was even “a little more insolent than he was”, as Howard Hawks remarked, who changed the heroine’s name in the film from Marie to Slim, after his wife. “The contagious thrill sparked by Bogart and Bacall’s romance defined the prevailing mood of the shoot,” Hawks concluded.

Two years later, Bacall and Bogie would reunite for The Big Sleep, one of the classics of film noir, heavy on great dialogue, style, wit and verve and an intricate and fast-paced plot, and where the time of day is appropriately night. As Vivian, Lauren Bacall is not a femme fatale, she is a cool, elegant charmer, with her reserved poise, angular beauty and immaculate finger waves, and dressed in Leah Rhodes’ costumes, one of which is the houndstooth wool suit, a reinterpretation of the one Bacall had worn in To Have and Have Not. That one had been inspired by a similar one Howard Hawks’ wife, Slim, liked to wear. Nancy “Slim” Hawks was in fact the one who had seen Lauren on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and told her husband that she was a star in the making, which made the director cast her in her debut film. The houndstooth wool suit with peplum jacket and pencil skirt is tailored to perfection and emphasises Bacall’s lean, willowy figure, just as all the other costumes do. It’s a timeless suit that’s never gone out of fashion. Lauren wears it with a matching bag and a black beret in her hands.

In The Big Sleep, she is wearing a beret again with the suit, but, this time, the jacket is not fitted to the body, but has a straight cut and it’s paired with a black sweater and a box purse. The gingham pattern comes up again in Dark Passage (Bernard Newman was the costume designer), this time in the form of a lounge gown, a much more subtle and restrained look, incredibly well descriptive of Irene. But it’s another checkered print that catches the eye. It’s the waist-long jacket with a more masculine cut, worn with a plain-coloured, loosely fit, under-the-knee skirt. Irene wears it at the beginning of the film, when she rescues Vincent from the highway. It’s a much more tomboyish, self-confident, mature and modern look, not just as a stand-alone piece, but also in relation with Lauren Bacall’s similar looks in the previous two films. And one can not help looking beyond the big screen, comparing Bacall’s characters throughout these films, no reason to deny the fascination the real, great movie stars continue to hold over us – especially those of us who, looking back at a different time, appreciate how everyone, including Hollywood’s biggest idols valued privacy more than anything else, and a new movie, a magazine or a newspaper was the only way the public would catch a glimpse of their favourite actors. Along these lines, I want to end with this paragraph from the book Bogie: A Celebration of the Life and Films of Humphrey Bogart: “They accepted each other as they were. He did not attempt to remake her according to some womanly ideal of his own – always a temptation when a man is a quarter of a century older than his wife. She did not object when he had to howl at the moon with his pals. But more and more they were quietly at home together, often in the company of other couples.”