Robert Montgomery's 1946 film
Lady in the Lake attempted to tell the entire story with a "subjective camera": shooting the film from the point of view of the main character, with the camera acting as his "eyes." The first hour or so of
Dark Passage does the same thing -- and the results are far more successful than anything seen in Montgomery's film.
Humphrey Bogart heads the cast as an escaped convict, wrongly accused of his wife's murder. After being forced to beat up a man (
Clifton Young) from whom he's hitched a ride, Bogart hides out in the apartment of
Lauren Bacall. With the help of friendly cabbie
Tom D'Andrea, Bogart makes contact with sympathetic plastic surgeon
Housley Stevenson, and with his new face (actually his old face, which we haven't seen during the first hour or so of the film) he seeks out
Agnes Moorehead, the actual murderer. An extortion attempt by the man whom Bogart had earlier punched out slows down things a bit, but Bogie finally catches up with Moorehead. Curiously, Bogart is never completely cleared, but he is granted a happy ending of sorts when, to the strains of "Too Marvelous for Words," he and Bacall head for Peru to start life anew.
Dark Passage is more interesting in its individual parts than its sum total, but it does manage to provide an new slant on the traditional Bogey-Bacall pairing.
