It’s a wonder that, with all this revolutionary technology maximizing our abilities to exchange information with others instantaneously, contemporary Hollywood has failed to produce a film as intriguing as Delmer Daves’ 1947 film-noir sensation Dark Passage.

Featuring one of Hollywood’s most prominent couples, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and shot on location in San Francisco, the filming of Dark Passage attracted large crowds of fans enamored with the idea of having such celebrities in their city.

Bogart and Bacall, both cast as the leads, play Vincent Parry and Irene Jansen. Parry, a fugitive on death row, escapes from San Quentin for murdering his wife. Through a stroke of luck and a bad encounter with a motorist, a beautiful but mysterious woman discovers him and smuggles him back to her home in San Francisco. Once there, the woman introduces herself as Irene Jansen, who had attended Parry’s hearings and always believed him to be innocent. Her real connection to him is left ambiguous, however, allowing the audience to freely interpret Jansen’s motives. Parry leaves Jansen’s house, suspicious of her bizarre behavior, and begins to realize how dangerous his return is for those associated with him.

Upon its release, Dark Passage was a commercial flop, heavily criticized for Bogart’s lack of screen time. However, its unorthodox cinematography, which showed a majority of the film from Parry’s perspective, forcing characters to directly interact with the camera, now known as the subjective camera technique. This technique, in conjunction with short dialog, effectively provokes a sense of urgency, allowing the audience to experience the paranoia of an escaped convict.

This film had the elements of an avant-garde masterpiece but its enigmatic intrigue seemed to disintegrate during the last half of the film, where the plot became the hokey Hollywood romance cliché that the audience sought and expected. Had the writers not given in to a Hollywood ending, there may have been much less plot holes, thus not leaving the viewer wanting answers. Regardless of the safe and happy ending, which compromises the integrity of both leads, it’s understandable that the producers chose this route. After all, a paycheck is better than no paycheck.