Humphrey Bogart. Sydney Greenstreet. Warner Brothers circa 1945. Car crashes. Romance. The perfect murder. The psychology of guilt. Everything about Conflict screams “Great Movie” but the final results are something less. The fault, I believe, lies in the script. For everything else is good.
Buy Conflict (1945) Blu-rayBogart plays Richard Mason, a successful engineer celebrating his fifth wedding anniversary with his wife Kathryn (Rose Hobart). But all is not well in the house of Mason. Richard has fallen in love with Kathryn’s younger sister Evelyn (Alexis Smith) and Kathryn knows it. But she’s refusing a divorce and notes that if he ever told Evelyn of his feelings, she’d laugh in his face. At the very least, she’d refuse him out of loyalty.
On their way home from the party, they have an accident (Richard was too busy staring at Evelyn through the rear-view mirror to watch the road). Richard hurts his leg, but the other two come out more or less unscathed. But it gives Richard an idea. His leg recovers fairly quickly, but he acts like he still can’t walk on it, making him wheelchair-bound and helpless. He decides he and Kathryn ought to go up into the mountains to get his mind off things. Swimming might be good for him. But at the last moment, something from work comes up and he can’t go. He begs Kathryn to drive up without him.
She does, but first, she stops off at Dr. Hamilton’s (Sydney Greenstreet) house to ask him to check up on Richard the following day. In the meantime, Richard has hurried up the mountain ahead of her, blocking her path on a secluded stretch of road. When she gets there, he kills her and then pushes her car (with her inside) off the road and down a cliff, which then becomes buried under a pile of felled trees.
Rushing back in time to meet with some coworkers (and giving him the perfect alibi), Richard acts worried that Kathryn has not made it to the mountain hotel. Eventually, he calls the police but since the car is buried under those logs, no one can find her. And since only he knows she’s dead, the assumption is she ran away or some such thing.
He seems to have gotten away with it. Except this is a movie. A movie from 1945 no less. Soon enough, strange things begin to happen. A bum is caught by the police in possession of some jewelry Kathryn had on her at the time of her disappearance. Her wedding ring (which again, she had on at the time of her murder) shows up at the house. He receives mysterious phone calls and letters in her handwriting.
Has Katherine’s ghost come back to haunt Richard? Or did she somehow survive everything and come back for revenge? Or is someone else creating an elaborate scam for some reason? I won’t spoil that aspect of the plot, but if you are paying any attention to the film at all, you’ll probably figure it out way before the actual reveal.
That’s the other problem with the film. It simply isn’t surprising in the least. From the opening scenes when we learn that Richard hates his wife, we know he’s going to kill her. Or when we are told Dr. Hamilton is a renowned psychologist, we know that guilt is going to play a large part in Richard’s downfall.
Bogart is great as always. He’s wonderful at displaying a range of subtle emotions from calculating anger, to surprise, fear, and guilt. Greenstreet is also wonderful, though the film doesn’t give him nearly enough to do. I thought they’d spend more time with him discovering what Richard did and using his psychological powers to bring him down. But mostly he’s sidelined. The romance angle with Evelyn never really goes anywhere and what is there isn’t interesting. Director Curtis Bernhardt and cinematographer Merritt B. Gerstad give it a great film noir look full of darkness and light. The stuff on the mountain set looks particularly good.
Again, it really is the script that lets us down. There just isn’t enough to it. If it leaned into the mystery a little more, or made us care about the romance, or had punchier dialogue, this could be a true classic. As it is, it is worth watching. Bogart and Greenstreet are always enjoyable (this would be their last film together). But it isn’t anything more than that.
Warner Archive presents Conflict with a new 4K transfer from the original camera negative and is looks wonderful. Extras include four silly shorts, a radio broadcast of Conflict (with Bogart), and several film trailers.
