This was the third pairing of Bogart and Bacall - To Have and Have Not,
The Big Sleep and after this one Key Largo. All fine films. To a lot of people
this one was a let down after To Have and The Big Sleep. The snappy dialogue
wasn't there and the chemistry was off, stilted, puzzling. Not playful as
in the two previous films. Deadly serious. Bogart had pushed Warner Brothers
to buy the book and make the film. They were not enthusiastic. The novel's
writer was working for them as a script writer but this was only his second
book and the first one had not sold all that well. But Bogart got his way
because he was Bogart. He laughingly said "wait till Jack Warner finds out
that you don't see my face for the first third of the film". That first third
is POV through Bogarts eyes or him in the shadows. Bogart actually underestimated
- you don't see his face without bandages till past the halfway mark. We
get the Bogart voice though. That is generally good enough.
I have rarely seen a film that follows the book so closely. The director/scriptwriter
Delmer Daves sticks to the book like a life preserver - most of the film's
dialogue comes right out of it. The only real difference is at the end when
the film gives it a Hollywood ending that is implied in the book but still
left open. The author of the book is one of the great though now often forgotten
hard bitten noir authors of the 1940s and 1950s, David Goodis. Even in Hollywood
he was considered an eccentric. Though he was getting well paid by Warners
and for his novels, he paid a friend $4 a week to sleep on his couch, his
car was falling apart and a running joke, he liked going into black clubs
and finding a large black woman and pay her to abuse him. His wife had left
him and it crushed and embittered him and they say she was often the model
of the women in his books. There are two of them here. Man eaters. Shape
shifters. Soulless.
After Goodis saw the film he complained that it followed his book too closely.
Saying "I am not Dashiell Hammett and Dark Passage is far from being The
Maltese Falcon, which in my opinion is the best melodrama ever made in Hollywood".
Though the film treads in the footprints of the book, there is no way to
capture the inner darkness of the book and the high octane out of control
language that Goodis uses. Though it is not told in first person narrative
it may as well be. It is completely shown through the thoughts of the protagonist,
Vincent Parry. The words and sentences are like a runaway car - speeding,
crashing, running over one another, going down cul-de-sacs and returning.
It is a rapid deep stream of paranoia, fear and suspicion. It is remarkable
writing and exhausting to read. I needed to take breaks. It was too intense.
It feels like Goodis was on a cocaine binge. Torrents of words spill out.
In what in real time may be a few seconds, the thoughts running through Parry's
mind take up pages. When he discovers his dead friend with the bashed head
it is pages of describing the blood splattered everywhere. And then he sits
down and has a conversation with his friend "Who killed you", "I wish I could
tell you but I'm dead". What is strange though is how the two main characters
seem ready made for Bogart and Bacall - Bogart all edgy, spitting out words
while Bacall is comforting, understanding, elegant. I wonder if he had them
in mind when he wrote the book. Being a big fan of The Maltese Falcon.
Parry was convicted for killing his wife - he didn't do it. He escapes prison
and after conking one driver on the head is picked up by Irene (Bacall) on
the road. She followed the trial, believes he is innocent and takes him home.
A sympathetic cab driver "I bet she deserved it" he says of Parry's wife
- takes him to a plastic surgeon (a wonderful turn by Houseley Stevenson)
and he goes to see his friend who will put him up till he can take the bandages
off. He is dead. He ends up back at Irene's. But the guy's car that he conked
is parked outside. Madge (also a terrific turn by Agnes Moorehead) a friend
of his wife is sniffing around. People keep dying around Vincent and Irene
keeps believing he is innocent. We never quite understand why she does. She
just does. This is as pure as noir can get without a woman sitting next to
you whispering she loves you as she sticks a knife into your stomach.
The book even more so. I am curious whether all his books have the same manic
writing style.
