1947: Agnes Moorehead in "Dark Passage" and "The Lost Moment"
Thursday, May 21, 2020 at 7:30PM by Nick Taylor
One way to search for great performances outside of Oscar's history books is merely to check in on what the great character actresses of their day were busy doing besides not getting their due. In 1947 just to cite a few examples, You couldn’t go wrong with Mary Astor, warm and sympathetic as the mother of sickly Liz Taylor in Cynthia, and even better at nimbly flipping through the morally compromised history of a saloon-owner afraid her daughter will run away with a dangerous man in Desert Fury. There’s also Elsa Lanchester as the housemaid in The Bishop’s Wife, so piquantly observant in a role that often invites stooging. But if we’re talking supporting actresses, surely the first stop for anyone seeking out the heavies of Classic Hollywood is Agnes Moorehead. Moorehead’s performances n Dark Passage and The Lost Moment were my first stops after completing Oscar’s lineup in preparation for the Smackdown.
The more famous of Moorehead’s two films in 1947 was Dark Passage, best known as the third of four films Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together...
Adapted from a newspaper serial released the previous year, Dark Passage follows Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart), freshly escaped from jail and looking to find out who set him up for the murder of his wife. After an unsuccessful go at hitchhiking, Parry is discovered by Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall), who believes he’s innocent and offers to let him hide at her place. The first third of the film is shot in a subjective, first-person POV style that director Delmer Daves encouraged for Robert Montegomery’s Lady in the Lake, which was in production at roughly the same time as Dark Passage but released several months earlier. Where Lady in the Lake sustains this device for its entire run time (minus some non-diegetic diversions), Dark Passage is rife with sloppy edits stitching its shots together, and it abandons this gimmick entirely in favor of a second-person omniscient style whenever Parry is being driven around. Daves’ uneven commitment to such a conspicuous storytelling device makes it seem weirdly arbitrary if you don’t know the big twist keeping us from seeing Bogart’s handsome mug for so long. (Spoiler alert: he gets radical plastic surgery to hide his identity.) It’s a pretty gonzo twist, one the film has a hard time building towards and does almost nothing meaningful with after it happens. Dark Passage is certainly watchable and has several elements to recommend it, but the slow pacing, bland direction, stolid lead performances, and increasingly exposition-heavy script all hamper it considerably.
Moorehead stars as Madge Rapf, a petty, relentless woman whose testimony that Parry’s wife fingered him for her murder right before she died was a key component in getting him locked away. No one likes Madge very much, and the ways everyone describes their hatred of her or the exact way she’s such a shitty person yields some of the film’s most artful, colorful dialogue. She gets her first real scene about halfway into Dark Passage, arriving at Irene’s apartment unannounced and begging for shelter. Madge just learned a friend of hers has been bludgeoned to death in his home - presumably by Vincent Parry - and believes she's next on his hit list. Irene anxiously refuses her, and when she tries to physically bar Madge from entering her bedroom, Madge’s fear of being killed doesn’t stop her from needling this woman about how close she’s gotten with her ex-fiance Bob (Bruce Bennett). Bob shows up soon after, and his argument with Madge registers as one of the few instances where Dark Passage is able to convey the history of its characters and relay new information about its central mystery at the same time, largely care of Moorehead and Bennett’s performances. They seem to genuinely hate each other, rehashing years of bitter history rather than infodumping their lives for the audience’s sake. I love how offended Madge is when she accuses Bob of not caring if Parry might kill her, or the way her normally expressive face goes completely blank when she’s caught doing something she shouldn’t have.
- Well, he admitted after the buildup that you weren't easy to get along with.
- Maybe I'm not."
Madge resurfaces very near the end of Dark Passage. The scene starts with some promise, as Madge is just about the only character who doesn’t see through Vincent Parry’s new look the second she sees him. When he shows up at her doorstep claiming to be a friend of Bob’s, she immediately takes an interest in him, only becoming more flirtatious as he lists off the qualities Bob mentioned about her that brought him to her home. But Parry gives up the goose of who he is and why he’s there oddly fast, nullifying a lot of dramatic tension so he can declare What Really Happened. Moorehead’s performance is the only thing working to justify what he’s saying, but she doesn’t reveal some hidden version of Madge to do so. Instead, she reworks the traits we've already seen Madge display to suit this new information. She’s completely stone-faced, her body language broadcasting how utterly terrified she is even as her voice remains unexpectedly petulant in the face of his demands, fully agreeing with his version of events but refusing to corroborate what he’s saying with a written confession. Moorehead’s performance inhabits a cruel irony, spitefully relishing that the man she’s hungered for for years has finally given her his complete attention, and she’s never been more afraid of him. Moorehead’s determination to make this scene work via the sheer strength of her own acting is ultimately a more engrossing spectacle than anything happening in the plot, and if Madge Rapf exits Dark Passage as ignobly as possible, her interpreter leaves with her dignity intact.
To close this piece on a slightly more excited note, I’d be remiss not to mention The Lost Moment, Moorehead’s other 1947 feature. Based on a Henry James novella, the film stars Robert Cummings as a publisher searching for the famous love letters of a long-dead, wildly famous 19th-century poet and his still-living paramour (Agnes Moorehead). To do this he tracks her down to her family estate in Venice, pretending to be an aspiring writer seeking refuge in Italy and boarding with this woman and her cold, suspicious great-niece (Susan Hayward, much better in Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman). Soon Cummings is standing at the crossroads of two bold, doomed love affairs, or perhaps just re-enacting a decades-old affair that's taken on a new, unsetting life. It also has the kind of sumptuous photography and sinuous editing that makes this very literary romance feel even more haunted and alive. Moorehead is ideal casting for a brittle, 105 year old woman who simply refuses to die, playing Juliana Bodereau as a startlingly lucid cryptkeeper of her own demons. Admittedly, the fact that Juliana can barely leave her chair limits Moorehead from utilizing her expressive physicality, and Martin Gabel’s filmmaking treats her as more of a Gothic object than a real character. Still, it's a rare treat to see her serve such a moody, cerebral vision, let alone in a Jo Van Fleet role. Compared to the rescue work she does in Dark Passage, this might not be the ideal venue to watch Moorehead do her thing, but both films have their own, considerable high points worth seeking out. And who could say no to Agnes Moorehead?
Moorehead in old age makeupAlso worthy in 1947
Kathleen Byron in Black Narcissus
Reader Comments (6)
I love your words.
Agnes was such a great actress.
I'll try to watch these movies.
She strides into Dark Passage and just takes the movie between her teeth and walks off with it. I like the film more than it sounds like you do but I concur that she is easily best in show. She's an unrepentant reptile and it's such a shame the film isn't in color to see the orange that she so favors and is a major plot point of the film.
The Lost Moment is such a bungle. Cummings is completely wrong in the lead. In a part with Charles Boyer's name all over it Cummings comes across like Jimmy Stewart playing a Parisian sewer worker. Susan Hayward is stronger in Smash-Up but she wasn't happy about being in the film and after viewing it always referred to it as "The Lost Hour and a Half". But even unrecognizable Agnes still gives it her best shot. I like the film even though it is a misfire but nothing compared to the recent disastrous remake which is dreadful in every way.
Weird to say I never found Bogart, or Steve McQueen while we are at it, as particularly handsome.
@Doug - Thank you!! Agnes shows pretty well in both of these, I’m sure you’d have a great time.
@joel6 - For real! I’m dying to see what her clothes and her house would’ve looked like bathed in orange. And she had such fantastic outfits, too! Between me liking The Lost Moment more and you liking Dark Passage more, I think we got these covered.
@Rama - A friend of mine said something like “Bogart was 9/10 of a very handsome man but the last 1/10 was pure bullfrog” and I can’t disagree with that.
I fairly recently saw Dark Passage as well as All That Heaven Allows. I love when Agnes is surrounded by beauty and yet is not afraid to expose (at least to the audience) her creepy, toxic persona wrapped up in self-righteousness. Not many actresses at the time were willing to make a whole career of it!
I love this movie, despite its flaws. I'm a fan of Agnes Moorehead, and I think she's super interesting here (especially in her final scene), but she's miscast--she's pretty far from a sexy femme fatale. Mary Astor, I think, would have been an ideal choice.