From The Petrified Forest to The Harder They Fall, Humphrey Bogart was the undisputed King of Film Noir. As Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Bogey set the tone for hard-boiled gumshoes navigating “the great wrong place” and surviving the intrigues of the deadly femme fatale. In Key Largo, he embodied the soul-dead weariness of a disillusioned crusader, who’d concluded the world was just too rotten to save. Bogart was so noir, he could shed the shadows and fog, defying the disinfecting powers of sunlight, to play betrayal, corruption and revenge on the picturesque streets of San Francisco. In Dark Passage, with the help of a fortuitous self-defenestration, and after the necessary extermination of underworld vermin no one would miss, Bogart extricates himself from peril and achieves one of the rare happy endings in a film that is nevertheless truly noir. Continue reading at https://kevinrush.us/2021/10/01/if-i-...