Conflict (1945) - film review

To their friends, Richard and Kathryn Mason are the ideal married couple.  In reality, their marriage is a sham, since Richard has fallen in love with his wife’s younger sister, Evelyn.  Realising that Kathryn will never agree to a divorce, Richard conceives what he believes will be the perfect murder.  After a road accident, he pretends to be unable to walk and arranges for his wife to take a holiday in a mountain resort.  Kathryn is surprised when she encounters her husband on a lonely stretch of mountain road but she realises in an instant that his intention is to kill her.  With his wife conveniently out of the way, Richard makes his first amorous advances towards Evelyn, but she insists that she can never love him.  Richard persists, determined to win the woman he truly loves, but then he begins to notice things that suggest his wife may not be dead after all...

Conflict is one of the lesser film noir dramas that Humphrey Bogart made during the 1940s, his golden decade.  The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942) had catapulted him overnight into the upper echelons of the Hollywood acting elite.  In the following decade he would feature in some of the most memorable films noirs, including To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).   Conflict is small beer when ranked alongside these timeless noir classics, yet Bogart’s presence in it makes it worth watching, despite one or two niggling flaws.

Conflict is a brooding, suspenseful mystery drama which would undoubtedly have been a classic were it not for a rushed ending that feels horribly like a cop out.  Bogart was reluctant to make the film, since there were obvious parallels with his own private life.  Like the character he portrays, he was trapped in a loveless marriage from which he longed desperately to escape, and, if the accounts of the unhappy union of the Battling Bogarts are to be believed, murder may sometimes have seemed like an attractive proposition.  The ease with which Bogart was able to identify with his character in this film could explain why his portrayal here is so convincing and so devastatingly poignant.

The only supporting artist whose contribution matches up to Bogart’s is Sydney Greenstreet, appearing here for the last time opposite Bogie in an encounter that reminds us of their first iconic confrontation in The Maltese Falcon.  Although Greenstreet is notionally the good guy (in that he is on the right side of the law), he is every bit as sinister and threatening as he is in his more familiar villainous roles.  It is Bogart we sympathise with, the archetypal noir hero whose attempts to find a better life for himself end merely in death or disillusionment.  Greenstreet, by contrast, is the heartless fiend that brings our hero to his doom, not with bullets or sadistic henchmen, but with psychoanalytical reasoning and Machiavellian cunning masquerading as civic duty.

Whilst Conflict fails to satisfy in the way that many of Bogart’s films do, it does offer one or two moments of inspired brilliance.  The scene in which Bogart confronts his wife on a near-expressionistic interpretation of a mountain road and then murders her is utterly chilling, partly because it is staged and shot so imaginatively, but also because we are seeing a side to Bogart’s character that we had not expected, that of the ruthless killer. 

Equally impressive is the montage dream sequence which takes us from an horrific road accident to a hospital room through the kaleidoscopic confusion in Bogart’s mind.  There is an opportunity here to weave a complex narrative with a really neat plot resolution, but for some reason the screenwriters just gave up.  What we get instead is a hurried denouement that just doesn’t feel like the right ending to the film.  How much better it would have been if Bogart’s character had really been going out of his mind...  The film’s bland title might then have had real significance.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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