Critics reviews

The reason I forgot most of the movie is that the plot stuff isn't that interesting, once you get past the weird directorial devices, but you have Bogie & Bacall, and Agnes Moorehead, and a good smarmy turn by ex-Our Gang actor Clifton Young as a gloating blackmailer... From a novel by eccentric noir/pulp specialist David Goodis, a favourite of the French (SHOOT THE PIANIST, MOON IN THE GUTTER), the film delivers plenty of bizarre stylistic touches, apart from yesterday's trumpet massacre.

Adapted from David Goodis's novel, "Dark Passage" is a movie of strange coincidences and occult connections. The least of these is the repeated use of "Too Marvelous for Words," a ballad by Johnny Mercer and Richard Whiting. The most electrifying, singled out by Mr. Kyrou for its "exaltation of total love," is the transition from a San Francisco bus station to a nightclub overlooking the Pacific, somewhere in Peru.

As uneven as the streets of San Francisco. . . . [Madge is] easily the most insufferable character in whole of film noir, if not all of cinema. Amid all of Dark Passage's implausibilities, the hardest to credit is that someone didn't push Madge out a high window years before. . . . The scene when he visits a back alley plastic surgeon is the best in the film: the quick pan to the crinkle-faced, grimy-looking doctor (Houseley Stevenson), puffing on a cigarette, is both a joke and a shock.

More than the Warner Bros. answer to MGM's Lady in the Lake, this is Delmer Daves' paramount noir dreamscape, imaginable amid Borges' Ficciones. . . . A work about salvation, or, more specifically, rebirth: The deathless Bogart face is at last delivered after a proper bandaged incubation, with the drinking straw as umbilical cord and the cig enjoyed by gauze-wrapped lips as the basis for Lee Marvin's sublime headscarf joke in The Big Red One.

This 1947 Humphrey Bogart number, directed with impressive verve by Delmer Daves, begins with a San Quentin prison break. . . . The structure and character sense of the David Goodis novel are intact, and a full-throttle supporting cast has a ball with meaty parts, particularly Tom D'Andrea as an interventionist cabbie and Houseley Stevenson as the black-market surgeon.

An odd, atmospheric 1947 thriller with a San Francisco setting, adapted by writer-director Delmer Daves from a David Goodis novel and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.