The New Pictures

The Dark Passage (Warner) builds up a remarkably long and effective delayed entrance for its star, Humphrey Bogart. During the first several reels, the camera--along with the audience--sees the world through the hero's eyes: rolling downhill in a barrel (he is a convict making a break); watching a cop's hand paw dangerously into his hideout in Lauren Bacall's auto (he is a convict getting a break); watching Miss Bacall register lovelight as she looks into the lens (a break cinemaddicts have had before).

Eventually, the camera gazes up at a sinister doctor (Housely Stevenson) who proposes to revise Bogart's face beyond the Law's recognition. For several reels more, the hero is visible only as an actor staging efficient silhouettes in a dark suit, his head masked in a glaring white, highly photogenic bandage. When at last this surrealist cocoon is peeled off to reveal nothing but Bogart, it is bound to be a little anticlimactic--but not too much. Bogart knows his way perfectly around this sort of plot. He finds out who murdered his wife and his best friend (he is accused of murdering them), disposes of a petty crook (Clifton Young) who has latched onto him for blackmail, and gets set for the ultimate clinch with Miss Bacall.

Quite aside from Mr. Bogart's high-skilled labor, The Dark Passage has the benefit of an unusually good script and direction by Delmer Daves, who also wrote and directed another unconventional thriller, The Red House (TIME, Feb. 17). Daves's first-person-singular manipulation of the camera profits by Robert Montgomery's good pioneering in Lady in the Lake (TIME, Jan. 27). Director Daves also has a sensitive hand with atmosphere and mood: there is a beautiful outdoor scene, for instance, in which the exhausted, bandaged Bogart, like a figure in a nightmare, staggers through the cold dawn light up a prodigious flight of empty wooden steps.

And Daves knows how to break players effectively out of type (Agnes Moorehead, who usually plays embittered spinsters, does handsomely in a sexy role). The picture is greatly enriched through minor characters and minor incidents. As added frights, the doctor and the crook are such well-conceived, well-played parts that they practically steal the show. And just as Bogart is about ready to try for his final getaway, the question of whether two cops in a bus terminal are oblivious of him or waiting for him adds a realistic kind of suspense that is too seldom used in movies. This thriller is not quite up to the best Hitchcock, but it does prove that Delmer Daves is a man to watch. And The Dark Passage is a picture to see.

Frieda (Rank; Universal-International), an English film, is very much in earnest about a subject worth talking about: the question of war guilt among rank-&-file Germans. Unfortunately, the movie hasn't much to recommend it except its earnestness. Most of it is far too obviously a stage play, and a rather elementary problem play at that.

The audience recognizes from the start that the German bride (Mai Zetterling) of the demobilized Englishman (David Farrar) can't be wholly "guilty" and is perhaps hardly "guilty" at all. A large part of the picture merely shows Mr. Farrar's mother (Barbara Everest), political-minded aunt (Flora Robson) and fellow townsmen slowly getting used to the obvious. Miss Zetterling's brother (Albert Lieven), on the other hand, is as fanatical a Nazi as Hitler himself; so there is no very interesting question about brother's guilt.

The wisest moralists and the best dramatists might exhaust themselves exploring the problem of war guilt, without coming to many unarguable conclusions. Such an attempt would be eminently worth everybody's attention. Even Frieda's stock characters and their stock attitudes could amount to something; but only if an intelligent attempt were made to get beneath their surfaces.

One leaves this film convinced that Mai Zetterling (who recently appeared in the Swedish film Torment) will be worth watching unless the glamorizers ruin her; that Mr. Farrar is a personable leading man; that the makers of this picture meant very well; and that nothing at all revealing, or even particularly real, has happened on the screen.

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