Film Review: The Passage (1979)

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There are bad films, there are very bad films and there are films that are even worse simply for being made by people who should have known better. The Passage, a 1979 war action film directed by J. Lee Thompson, is one such film. The plot, based on the novel by Bruce Nicolaysen, who also wrote the script, begins during the German occupation of France in the Second World War. The unnamed protagonist (played by Anthony Quinn) is a Basque mountain shepherd hired by the French Resistance to guide Professor Bergson (played by James Mason), an important scientist wanted by the Nazis for his weapons expertise, over the Pyrenees to the relative safety of neutral Spain. The Basque has second thoughts after discovering that he would have to guide not only Bergson but also his teenage son Paul (played by Paul Clemens) and daughter Leah (played by Kay Lenz), as well as his wife Ariel (played by Patricia Neal), a frail woman unlikely to survive the long and perilous journey. Apart from the elements, the Bergsons also have to deal with the Gestapo and Captain von Berkow (played by Malcolm McDowell), its sadistic officer determined to catch them at any cost.

Based on the premise and names involved, The Passage looked good on paper. The relatively simple plot that takes place in the mountains and forests would have provided both western-style action and strong drama. Its director J. Lee Thompson became famous thanks to The Guns of Navarone, a WW2 action classic with the always dependable Anthony Quinn as one of its stars. What the audience gets instead is an almost complete mess. The film editing is incomprehensibly bad, ruining many potentially great scenes and giving the film an unintentionally “artsy” look. Cinematography is also atrocious, making some scenes too dark and almost incomprehensible. The script adds to the confusion with twists that come out of nowhere, like the Resistance suddenly engaging in a big battle with Germans guarding a passenger train, or the protagonist suddenly arriving at a heavily guarded hotel to rescue Leah from von Berkow’s captivity. This, of course, happens only after von Berkow has had his way with the unfortunate girl, displayed in a way uncharacteristically graphic even for the lax 1970s standards, and after that The Passage looks more like a cheap Nazisploitation piece like those that sparked the 1980s “video nasties” moral panic than like the serious big-budget WW2-themed production it was supposed to be. The Bergsons are, near the end, also inexplicably transformed from helpless refugees into a small army able to defeat dozens of well-armed and well-trained Wehrmacht soldiers. Thompson manages to ruin things even at the end, when it toys with clichés borrowed from the horror genre, but the scene is again mishandled, with a voice-over narration that explains it as someone’s bad dream.

Not all things are bad in The Passage. Patricia Neal uses some of her real-life health issues to deliver a strong performance as the unfortunate Mrs Bergson, and her death scene, one of the rare scenes that was edited in an old-fashioned and disciplined way, is the most moving moment of the film. The most memorable element is, however, the performance of McDowell, who deliberately goes over the top as a sadistic villain who humiliates, tortures, mutilates, rapes and murders people with a lot of macabre ingenuity and unhidden delight. Many years afterwards, McDowell said that he knew that The Passage would be a bad film, so he deliberately tried to give it a “campy” atmosphere by being unhinged in his role and trying to outdo himself as Alex in A Clockwork Orange. His prediction proved right and The Passage was savaged by critics only to quickly sink into oblivion; those who remember the film do so mostly due to McDowell in one of the most effective roles of his career. Sadly, that performance requires too many sacrifices from an audience that lacks either masochism or the ability to appreciate extraordinarily bad films.

RATING: 3/10 (+)