If it may please the court: The Case of Dark Passage, a 1947 crime drama, directed by Delmer Daves, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. It was the third of four movies the couple made together, and most famous for the first-person point-of-view for its opening scenes.

Dark Passage is one of the most distinctive and unusual Hollywood films of its era.

But is it—or is it not—noir?

And here is Judge Noir’s Ruling…

1) I really like Delmer Daves, as a writer and a director.
As a director, Daves always comes in through the writer’s door, giving his actors great scenes—he’s so generous with his lines, even the smallest part often has some memorable business or tag line. We remember the characters from his films, the cabbies, the waiters, the cops—each Straight Joe or Memorable Misanthrope has an interior life, and it adds a huge texture to this film.

But Daves is no slouch as a director and was the one person who made extended first-person POV work in a Hollywood film. He did it by using two techniques: the first is that this kind of POV is always MOTIVATED by something, in the same way you motivate a pan shot by following something moving—it takes your attention away from the choice of camera placement, diverting you instead to what the character is observing. The second thing he does is to give your eye a break by moving back to a 3rd person POV for a location shot or change of scene. It’s all very effective and never feels like a gimmick.

2) This is one strange movie. At some point, Daves (and the scriptwriter team) decided to ignore the normal Hollywood “realistic” film plotting scheme and go to Europe for their inspiration, and maybe even back in time to 1850, where French writers like Hugo and Alexandre Dumas were writing great novels. When you read these novels for the first time, it takes a little getting used to the idea of that plot coincidences are not bad writing, but are instead an accepted feature of the genre they were writing in (perhaps an extension of the allegorical novel that came before it).

Just as Pinocchio keeps meeting the Fox & Cat every time he steps out the door, just as all of Dumas’ characters keep bumping into each other the moment they turn a street corner, the characters in Dark Passage seem to living in a world of maybe 100 people, where running into who you know is not only expected but inevitable. It gives the film an eerie feeling, like the characters are walking through a dreamscape, and it pulls the story away from our Classic Hollywood roots, back to something more primal or elemental.

3) This film deliberately violates the most basic rule of the postwar films that are now called noir—a rule eloquently summed up by Tom Neal’s character in Detour: “That’s life. Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you.” But not in Dark Passage, where fate sends Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart), a cascade of good fortune, for example, a sympathetic taxi driver, a great plastic surgeon who will change his face, and the most amazing stroke of luck of all – a woman named Irene Jansen, who has followed the trial and thinks he is innocent and is eager to help. And oh yes, did I tell you she’s an other-dimensionally Lauren Bacall-kind-of-beautiful? Well, okay, she IS Lauren Bacall but you get my point. Yes, Parry is innocent of murdering his wife, but as he admits himself, he sure has THOUGHT about it, and in the world of noir, that’s usually enough.

This film chooses to ignore the pessimistic, cynical zeitgeist that lay like a sooty, nicotine-tinged marine layer over America circa 1947, and instead gives us a “just” hand of fate, willing to give our hero a break and let him find his way to find his way to Peru to wait for Irene – and with this goal in mind, he recapitulates Ringo Kid’s famous dream of utopia spoken to Dallas in Stagecoach: “I still got a ranch across the border. There’s a nice place—a real nice place … trees … grass … water. There’s a cabin half built. A man could live there … and a woman. Will you go?”

And amazingly … Perry and Irene, and the rest of us—we all get there.

Now it’s time for Judge Noir to rule: While having many elements of noir, and in the right era, and EVEN starring Humphrey Bogart, this film is NOT noir, but if anything, is an extension of the Western genre, where that shining light, that “cabin in the sky,” is now farther south than just across the border, but just as inviting.

And yet—that dreamscape that Daves has walked us through—is still so odd, so troubling, so filled with people who are so trying to get something they don’t have—there is so much LONGING in this film, such a desperate desire to get something they don’t have and need so much.

This need—this overpowering longing—it reminded me of a famous short story about a soldier with a noose around his head, standing on a bridge during America’s Civil War, a soldier about to be hanged, a young man who longs so much to live—and when he’s dropped … and the rope breaks … he gets his chance to make his break – he drops in the water and races for freedom, and he’s almost home … we sickeningly realize he’s still on the bridge and these are the last seconds of his life.

What if Dark Passage is Dave’s version of Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and Parry, rolling down the hill after falling off the truck, is having the last moments of his life before meeting his end at the bottom of the ravine, and in his last moments, he’s thinking about his escape and all the wonderful things that could happen to him (let’s call it a series of fortunate events), right before he hits the bottom of the ravine. And then, nothing—blackness. No more film in the projector.

If that’s the case, then Dark Passage truly lives up to its name, and we have watched the ‘noirest’ of all noirs.