Dark Passage

1st edition cover

Dark Passage (1946) is a novel by David Goodis which was the basis for the 1947 film noir Dark Passage.

Plot

Vincent Parry, convicted of murdering his wife, escapes from prison and is taken in by Irene Jansen, an artist with an interest in his case. Helped by a friendly cabbie, Parry gets a new face from a plastic surgeon, thereby enabling him to dodge the authorities and find his wife's real killer. He has difficulty staying hidden at Irene's, because Madge Rapf, the spiteful woman whose testimony sent him up to prison, keeps stopping by.

Film

Dark Passage was adapted for the big screen in 1947, with a screenplay by Delmer Daves, who also directed. It reunited Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and co-starred Bruce Bennett and Agnes Moorehead.

The television series Tales from the Crypt featured an episode loosely based on the film, entitled "You, Murderer".

Legal issues

The copyright status of Dark Passage was the subject of a dispute between Goodis' estate and United Artists Television. The Goodis estate claimed that the UA series The Fugitive constituted copyright infringement. United Artists claimed that the work had fallen into the public domain under the terms of the Copyright Act of 1909 because it had been first published as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post, and that Goodis never obtained a separate copyright on the work. In Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit limited the so-called "Doctrine of Indivisibility," explaining that it was a judicial doctrine related only to standing, and should not operate to completely deprive a claimant of his copyright.