IslandGuru Who payed the critics

GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

kennethfrankel We are watching a movie, which tries to show real scenes. A jury would not see this movie, they would have evidence presented to them.1) Why would the Bogart character Mr. Mason be guilty if he went down to the wrecked car? His lawyer at the trial could simply say that Mr. Mason was very upset at his wife's disappearance. He would look for evidence of an accident as he drove around the area. So Mr. Mason remembered that he saw that the pile of logs had been disturbed and went down to check it out. How can you really dispute that? It does not mean that he knew what only the killer could have known.2) The business of the rose - OK, he slipped up. But he might have imagined that his wife liked a rose or other flower pinned to her outfit. The doctor friend gave the wife a rose, while Mr. Mason was supposed to be a shut-in, with a bad leg. He did need a cane to get around, after all. Bad, yes, but not enough to convict.I had wondered how Mr. Mason got down the hill with a bad leg. Looking at it again, it really was not that far down and there was a sort of series of steps or ledges. But at night in the fog, with slippery rocks, with street shoes ... What was really amazing was how did the doctor get down? Greenstreet is not exactly in mountain climbing shape.3) The doctor and police were tampering with the evidence, and planting evidence, in order to shake the tree and see what falls out, to push Mr. Mason over the edge. A defense lawyer might get much of the evidence thrown out due to prosecutorial misconduct.The wife was found by the police right away. We did not see how she was killed. Was it obvious that the crash did not do it?Sort of has echos of ANGEL FACE (1953) or IMPACT (1949).

merrywater Great actors, great story, good pacing, however...there's something wrong with it. It doesn't deliver the whole way through. I don't know exactly what is wrong with Conflict, it just leaves me unsatisfied.It might be that the musical score - the usual highfaluting 40s score - is less suited for this kind of surrealistic psychological drama than for the other Bogart movies.It might be the dialogue, rather uninspiring, definitely neither Chandleresque nor Hitchcockesque.It might be the unconvincing love story between Bogart and his sister-in-law.Compare it to Spellbound and you'll get my point.

Spikeopath Conflict is directed by Curtis Bernhardt and collectively written by Arthur T. Horman, Dwight Taylor, Robert Siodmak and Alfred Neumann. It stars Humphrey Bogart, Alexis Smith, Sydney Greenstreet, Rose Hobart, Charles Drake and Grant Mitchell. Music is by Frederick Hollander and cinematography by Merritt B. Gerstad.Still under exposed after all these years, Conflict is deserving of reappraisals by the film noir crowd. Plot has Richard Mason (Bogart) stuck in a loveless marriage to Kathryn (Hobart), with his misery further compounded by the fact he's in love with his sister-in-law, Evelyn (Smith). Finally having enough, Richard murders his wife and intends to woo the younger Evelyn into his life. However, when Richard starts glimpsing his wife out in the city and little items of hers start turning up, Richard starts to doubt his own mind.In essence it's a psychological thriller spiced with German Expressionism, perhaps unsurprising given that Bernhardt and Siodmak are key components of the production. The psychoanalysis angle played out would of course become a big feature in the film noir cycle, and here it makes for a most interesting story as Bernhardt and Gerstad dress it up in looming shadows, rain sodden streets and treacherous mountain roads. The pungent air of fatalism is evident throughout, the pace of the piece purposely sedate to marry up with the sombre tones as Richard Mason, a disturbed menace, him self becomes menaced.OK, you don't have to be an ace detective to figure out just exactly what is going on, so the reveal at film's closure lacks a bit of a punch, but the atmospherically tinged journey is well worth undertaking regardless. Bernhardt's camera is often like some peeping tom spying on the warped machinations of Mason, and all the while Hollander adds thematically compliant music to proceedings. Bogart was pretty much press ganged into making the picture, but come the final product it's evident that even though he may have been unhappy initially, he ended up delivering one the most intriguing turns in his wonderful career.Greenstreet is his usual presence, here playing the psychiatrist family friend who delivers the telling lines whilst being ahead of the game. Unfortunately the two principal lady characters aren't done any favours by the otherwise taut screenplay, especially Evelyn, who as the catalyst for the sinister shadings never gets chance to build a strong emotional bridge to Richard Mason's psychological make-up. Still, when you got Bogart as an unhinged killer attired in trench-coat and fedora, and a director who knows how to place him in the right visual scenarios, the flaws can't kill the film's strengths. 7/10

sol **SPOILERS** Big time architect Dick Mason, Humphrey Bogart, had been having his eye on his old lady's kid sister Evelyn Turner, Alexis Smith, ever since before he married the old bag, who's 14 years older the Eve, but just couldn't bring himself to make a play for her. It's Dick's wife Katherine, Rose Hobart, women's intuition that has her realize her husbands feeling about her sister that cause a great amount of tension between, in public, the loving couple. Dick finally gets his chance to put an end to his very unhappy marriage after he was involved in a car smash up, by looking at Evelyn in the rear view mirror instead of the road, that left him wheel chair bound with his passengers Evelyn and Katherine totally unhurt. Laid up at his house Dick with his mind working overtime, but not on his job as an architect, concocts this plan to get rid of his overbearing and nagging wife once in for all.Making like he can't walk which in fact he could Dick has Katherine travel out to her, as well as his, favorite mountain resort-Mountain Springs-telling her he'll meet her there later in the afternoon when his butler will give him a lift out there. Getting to Mountain Springs before Katherine Dick murders the startled woman, who never suspected to see him there so soon, and dumps her and her car down a steep cliff where they gets crushed and buried by a sh*t load of fallen timber. With Dick thinking that he committed the perfect crime he now drives home and plans to get it on with Evelyn after the mourning period for Katherine is over; Or so he thought!As things turn out in the movie Katherine instead of being killed somehow seemed to have survived her, in what Dick wanted everyone to think, tragic accident! Everywhere he goes, in the city or around the house, Dick sees things that Katherine had on her, when she was murdered by him, suddenly and unexpectedly pop up. It's as if she deliberately left them here to screw up his already very confused and guilt-ridden mind. Even Dick's attempt to get romantically involved with Evelyn quickly falls apart in her sensing that he's not exactly playing with a full deck in his confusion in if his wife Katherine is still alive making him, if he ever marries Evelyn, a bigamist as well as a possible murderer! The final shoe to drop, on Dick's head, is when Evelyn realizing what a triple "A" nut-case he is and drops him for her boyfriend Professor Norman Holdsworth, Charles Drake, who's as nuts about her as Dick is. The difference is that Norman didn't have to murder or try to murder her sister in order to get Evelyn to fall in love and marry him!The man who had Dick's number right from the start, as shown at the very beginning of the movie, was non-other the legendary "Fat Man"-of "Maltese Faclon" fame-himself Sidney Greenstreet playing the part of psychoanalyst Dr. Mark Hamilton. It was Mark who in studying Dick's bizarre behavior while his wife Katherine was both alive and later missing soon came to the conclusion that he beside being slightly mentally unbalanced was also capable of murder as well! *** MAJOR SPOILER**** But it was the gift of a rose that Mark, an armature botanist, gave to Katherine just before her fateful trip that tipped him off to what that devious husband of her's Dick was really up to. That's when Dick not really knowing the significance of what that rose meant, in his wife's disappearance, finally after covering all the bases ended tripping himself up!