Humphrey Bogart spends at least half of Dark Passage heard but not seen. When the movie isn’t shot from his point of view – little more than a gimmick in any day and age, though I guess in 1947 it might have had the benefit of novelty; sort of like a first-person shooter long before first-person shooters –, Bogie’s face is either a shadowy silhouette or wrapped in bandages. The latter is the result of a back-alley plastic surgery, which is itself an oddity since this is an extreme that more often than not only true villains will go to – perhaps because only a truly guilty conscience could bear to part with the face in the mirror.
In this case, however, Vincent Parry (Bogart) is a the victim of a Miscarriage of Justice who sets out to Clear My Name. What happens if he does manage to prove his innocence? Will he then undergo further cosmetic surgery and go back to looking like whatever it was he looked like before? Or will he just go through the rest of his life with a surgically rearranged visage? Something tells me ol’ Vince did not think this through; on the other hand, he could have done a lot worse – like, for instance, Peter Lorre in The Face Behind the Mask.
Of course, for all the good his new face does him, he might as well have kept the old one and saved himself the money and the time – and one could say the same of writer/director Delmer Daves; I mean, what’s the point of getting Bogie (who had by then starred in, among others, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep) only to have us play peek-a-boo with him for the first half of the film?