Program Notes

This was the third film to star Humphrey Bogart with his bride Lauren Bacall, and like the previous two To Have and Have Not (1945) and The Big Sleep (1946) the characterizations are feisty and the dialogue brittle.

The setting of Dark Passage (Warner Brothers, 1947) is San Francisco, with Bogie as an escapee from San Quentin, a man falsely accused of the murder of his wife. Delmar Daves directed from his own script based on the David Goodis novel, with Bacall as the girl who believes his innocence. She looks after him in her apartment following the treatment for the facial surgery that alters his appearance. He then goes about tracking down the real killer who turns out to be the wife (Agnes Morehead) of a friend. She confesses but before she can provide him with an alibi she accidently falls to her death from a window. Now with no hope of clearing his name he leaves for South America, there to be joined by the woman who loves him.

Franz Waxman’s score paints in the unseen background propelling the picture with dramatic orchestral tones, heightening suspense and finally resolving the score with the love theme as the protagonists leave behind the past and head for a new life elsewhere. At the end of the scoring session the musicians might well have said to the conductor-composer, “Well Franz, you’ve have done it again.”

– Tony Thomas, 1996