Dark Passage
Screening on Film
Directed by Delmer Daves.
With Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Bruce Bennett.
US, 1947, 35mm, black & white, 106 min.
With Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Bruce Bennett.
US, 1947, 35mm, black & white, 106 min.
The second of two major studio features to experiment with first-person camera perspective, Dark Passage uses its first half—told from the point of view of an escaped prisoner rushing with mysterious purpose towards San Francisco—to describe a paranoid vision of the city as a perilous trap under ceaseless surveillance. Bogart and Bacall’s least-known film is the tautest and strangest of their iconic collaboration.