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A compelling RKO noir melodrama from John Farrow (The Big Clock, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Alias Nick Beal, His Kind of Woman), with great camera work from Nicholas Musuraca, and top-line art direction from Ralph Berger and  Albert S. D’Agostino.

A naive young doctor falls for a stunningly beautiful but unstable young woman, and ends up the target at a shoot-out on the Mexican border after a frantic road trip to escape a murder rap. Robert Mitchum is the doctor and little-known b-actress Faith Domergue is the dame. Domergue steals the picture from Mitchum.  Her nuanced performance as a ravishingly sublime femme-fatale is enthralling and she dominates every scene. There are many close-ups of her manic eyes full of menacing allure.  If she is crazy, she is the sanest psychopath to inhabit a film noir. Her guile and determination are almost heroic.

Low angle available-light interior shots exposing ceilings early on are deftly used to frame scenes of tension and violence.The noir motif of entrapment is strongly focused by close-framed shots, particularly on the road, where the fleeing protagonists are shown within the car or from outside the car in close-up, and rarely in open spaces.  The climactic finale on a neon-lit street in a border own at night is beautifully lit and the action superbly edited. If not for Domergue’s manic turn and Musuraca’s camera, Farrow’s less than taught direction would have doomed the picture to mediocrity. The establishing scenes drag, and the middle section with Mitchum and Domergue on the lam is slow, with two aimless interludes: when they have a car accident, and in a small town where they are forced to ‘wed’.  There is an unnecessary and soppy final scene that undermines the riveting penultimate scene where the camera stares up at Mitchum’s tortured face against an industrial wire fence as the cops surround the fugitives after the shoot-out.

A uneven film made memorable by Domergue’s portrayal and the stunning climax.

Director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton transform a police procedural screenplay into a dark visionary descent into a subterranean noir realm, where two undercover cops inhabit a flip-side life of criminality, brutality, and violence.  These men exist almost exclusively as ciphers whose lives have meaning only in the dark seething undertow of a sinister metropolis. So immersed are these men, that the dying words of one are cheap remonstrations of deceit, and the final vengeful shootout delivers a duel to the death.  Add to the mix, stand-out performances by Dennis O’Keefe as the T-man O’Brien, Wally Ford as a doomed hood who carries the richly redolent moniker of ‘the Schemer’, and Charles McGraw as the ruthless hit-man ‘Moxie’, and you have a top-flight thriller.

Every scene in this movie is a set-piece where the mis-en-scene, the lighting, and the camera’s fluid peregrinations in an electric fusion of a chiaroscuro aesthetic and technical mastery,  draw the viewer into a hyper-reality of grim tension, dark tenements, hellish steam baths, desolate streets, seedy nightclubs, drab wharves, rusting cargo steamers, sinister business offices, and the decadent palatial homes of mobsters.  This nether world is rotten to the core – each time a boss is uncovered yet another further up the social scale surfaces.

Only a touch of pathos is allowed when one of the T-Men and his wife have to deny their identities and feign being strangers, and even this scene telegraphs the cop’s fate as we leave the wife with the glint of a tear in her estranged eyes.

One of the classic noirs – not to be missed.

In the only film directed by Charles Laughton, The Night of the Hunter, we have an example of the danger of applying a template approach to establishing a picture as a film noir. Expressionist lighting and criminality – tick. But these elements alone do not a noir make. The Night of the Hunter is a gothic tale of good versus evil: there is no ambivalence nor an inversion of traditional values. Good triumphs over evil and the story ends.

This is not to say Night of the Hunter is not a great film- it assuredly is.  A tale about a psychotic and murderous Southern preacher terrorising two children who know the whereabouts of a loot of stolen money is not without flaws, but great nonetheless. The compelling screenplay, first class acting, atmospheric cinematography, and an enthralling stylised mise-en-scene from a first-time director make it great.

The editing is not fluid however, and the narrative flow suffers. Whether this is due to cuts made after completion of the preview version is uncertain. In a new book on the making of the movie, author Jeffrey Coachman says Laughton re-interpreted James Agee’s script, which itself was based on the first novel of Davis Grubb. The original Agee script surfaced in 2003, and out-takes still exist and have been viewed by Couchman. Also certain studio scenes clash jarringly with on-location shots.  Scenes in a small town near the end of the film are so obviously set-bound, that the drama takes on a theatrical tone which weakens the ‘reality’ of the story. The ending steers perilously close to sentimentality, but is saved by the luminous acting of Lillian Gish.

Other weaknesses relate to a certain moral relativism. The opening scene that establishes the story arc is not as strong as it should be – a weak performance by Peter Graves as the father on-the-run with the loot is redeemed only by the young actors playing his children. The father is caught and hanged, after sharing his cell with the evil preacher played superbly by Robert Mitchum, who learns that the loot has been hidden but not where. In the cell, disturbingly, the father justifies his crime, and presumably the killing of two people during the robbery, by saying he did it so his kids would not suffer during the hard times of the depression. After the hanging, the hangman is shown going home to his wife and young children and his remorse is clearly established. Yet at the end he is shown gleefully anticipating the hanging of another man – the preacher. An elderly married couple who are friends of Grave’s widow and portrayed as the salt of the earth in their generosity and concern for the woman alone struggling to raise her two children, at the end of the movie are transformed into unhinged rabble-rousers screaming for revenge and leading a lynch mob.

These weaknesses aside, there are stunningly elegiac scenes as the story unfolds. The most compelling is of the murdered widow still sitting upright in a car submerged in a river.

 

I start viewing each Humphrey Bogart picture with a heightened anticipation, so strong is the Bogart persona in any movie.  Alas, Dark Passage is one of the few  Bogart pictures that disappoints.  Bogart goes through the motions of an escaped con on the run trying to clear himself of a murder charge, and Lauren Bacall look great, but for a thriller the whole affair is flat.

Based on a story by David Goodis, the screenplay relies on too many implausible coincidences.  The pedestrian direction of Delmer Daves (The Red House) constrains the  camera of cinematographer Sid Hickox (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Possessed, White Heat), and the Franz Waxman score is sadly undistinguished.  You don’t see Bogart’s face  for the first half of the movie, with the camera taking a point of view angle – it didn’t work in Lady in The Lake (1947) and it doesn’t work here.  The ending is lame, and the climax is ho-hum even though a dame falls out of the window of an apartment building!

Deep focus outdoor scenes on the streets of San Francisco sustain visual interest, and the hilly topography results in some great angled shots.  Snappy lines of dialog enliven some static scenes, and there are interesting bit-roles that to a limited extent mitigate the film’s overarching weaknesses.  Agnes Moorehead is entertaining as a closet psychopath, but her camp characterisation is out-of-place in an otherwise earnest scenario.   A veteran bit-player with an  expressively craggy visage, Houseley Stevenson, is great as an eccentric  bootleg plastic surgeon.  Tom D’Andrea as a helpful cab driver,  Clifton Young as a small-time hood turned blackmailer, and  Tory Mallison as Bogart’s only friend, contribute immensely in roles that are pivotal to the story.  To give Daves, who adapted Goodis’ novel, due credit, the taxi cab scene is great – with Bogart’s “old” face in shadow in the back seat working so much better than the POV gimmick.

As for Dark Passage being a film noir, I suppose at a stretch you could say that there is an underlying theme of entrapment, but there are no noir atmospherics or motifs.