Film Noir Classics that Come at You Like a Freight Train at a Confessional

Did you ever have that suffocating feeling that no matter what you said or did, no one would ever believe you and things were inevitably going to turn out badly? That’s a bad dream, the 2024 Election, and a film noir movie.

Humphrey Bogart and Agnes Moorehead from “Dark Passage” (1947). Can you believe that Samantha’s mother Endora from Bewitched was once a kind of femme-fatale?

DARK PASSAGE (1947, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Agnes Moorehead, Clifton Young) Escaped, framed convict Vincent Parry somehow gets a ride from Irene Jansen (Bacall), who pities him and allows him to hide in her SF apartment. A cabbie recognizes Parry, yet sympathetically sends him to a plastic surgeon, who makes him look like…Humphrey Bogart! (talk about the luck for real-life lover Bacall). This is where Parry’s luck goes south, as he’s found by blackmailer Baker (Clifton Young, who looked like he was freshly off the “Our Gang” studio lot…because he was). After Parry causes Baker to fall to his death (something Spanky and Alfalfa were dying to do), he learns that jealous ex-lover Madge (Moorehead) had set him up, confronts and accidentally kills her (incidentally, if you see Moorehead in a noir…run! She was also the villain in “Without Honor”, 1949, and “Caged” 1950). Just when that claustrophobic noir “you’ll never get a break” feeling starts to set in…well I won’t spoil the ending. This is my favorite noir, and I actually read the book (you didn’t know they actually wrote books for noirs, did…