Humphrey Bogart in Argument!... or Disagreement!... or Quarrel!... or Dispute!... or...

CONFLICT

1945

Directed by Curtis Bernhardt

Written by Robert Siodmak, Alfred Neumann, Arthur T. Horman, and Dwight Taylor

Spoilers: moderate (or a touch more than moderate, but, anyway, not high)

But it's true, right?  That name sucks—floating indifferently into the very theoretical upper reaches of just how boring any movie's name could get.  So your narrative has a "conflict"?  Good grief.  The movie itself isn't boring, but, in even fuller fairness to it, it also wasn't supposed to be called Conflict: the details are enormously nebulous and I frankly can't tell you anymore than is available in the movie's own credits information, but it was based upon a work—even what kind of work isn't clear, as just reading the credits suggests "short story," but that doesn't make much sense, and if it was a short story, it certainly wasn't one that I was able to find—called "The Pentacle," by Robert Siodmak and Alfred Neumann.  Siodmak and Neumann were film professionals (Siodmak a rather famous one, of course), which is why I assume their story was either a screenplay treatment or a full-on draft, but whatever it was, it was adapted with what seems like a loose hand by the actual screenwriters, Arthur T. Horman and Dwight Taylor—free enough, anyway, that it occasioned some measure of rights wrangling with the two original co-scenarists.  It probably goes without saying that The Pentacle sounds a lot cooler, and I would hesitantly suppose it got nixed because people in 1943 (the movie being legally delayed for a bit) either didn't know what a "pentacle" was, or they simply already associated it with Satanism.  That sure doesn't seem like the angle Siodmak and Neumann were going for, and I daresay they didn't know what a pentacle was, because pentacles have always been magic sigils (though they're not necessarily pentagrams and the etymology actually has nothing to do with Greek, or "five," but instead shares a Middle French root with "pendant").  I think what they meant was a pentagon or pentahedron—let's just say a shape where it feels like there should be a five somewhere in its geometry—insofar as such a shape is one of the several reminders of the guilt carried by its despicable antihero.  Hence one of the small annoyances of a pretty swell film that only ever really has small annoyances is that it's a pretty infrequent reminder—perhaps in tandem with that title shift—the shape of the chaotic makeshift grave of his wife appearing before him to conjure up his memories of her murder neither once, nor thrice, but a clunky-feeling twice.

I have likely given more thought to that title than anybody involved in the movie did—you'd at least expect it to get dropped with great portentousness somewhere in the screenplay, but you'd be wrong; they do so in its radio play adaptation, and as it sounds pretty stupid, I'm glad they eschewed it (along with any voiceover narration) in the movie itself—but either way, Conflict is what we're dealing with.  And it's a pleasure to deal with (a bit of a sick one, but it's a noir, or at least noir-adjacent, so that comes with the territory), though this is not a sentiment that was shared by its star, Humphrey Bogart, who had to be cajoled and threatened into doing the film at all.  This is probably less because he thought it was bad than because his character was a bad man, and though he had emerged into stardom as a gangster back in The Petrified Forest back in 1936, he had been consolidating his screen persona as a hard-edged heroic figure; such a figure was he set to play in 1944's Passage To Marseille, which muddies my assumption that Bogart would know a good screenplay when he saw one, because he was stoked to be in that piece of shit, one of the worst (Allied-side, anyway) wartime propaganda films I ever saw, that amounts, mostly, to just his and his co-stars' French convict characters pledging allegiance to the tricolore, over and over and over, for nearly two hours.  (It's likelier that his fervor was out of his attested frustration with being too old to be acceptable to the U.S. Navy when he tried to re-enlist.  Well, you weren't too old to be acceptable to Lauren Bacall, so I guess you didn't really have that much to bitch about.)  Anyway, Warners held his participation in Passage To Marseille hostage; he bent; and, to his credit as an actor, it's a fine performance that needs precisely Bogart, and the combination of laconicism and latent ferocity that he so often brought to his roles, perhaps especially the ones he didn't want.

Our "conflict" concerns a love triangle where one point isn't even initially aware she's in one: this is Evelyn Turner (Alexis Smith), presently staying for a while with her rather significantly older sister Kathryn Mason (Rose Hobart), whose husband Dick Mason (Bogart; "I come from a long line of dickmasons," if we must, as it certainly occurred to me too) has, in the throes of his own midlife, developed an infatuation with his vivacious sister-in-law.  He's so droolingly obvious about it that Kathryn has been aware of it for ages before the movie's begun, though it's an open question whether her emasculating shrewishness was the cause of it or just the consequence; you likewise have to wonder if it's a slight miscalibration of the screenplay's sense of irony against the clarity and concision of the performances, or if their friend and neighbor, Dr. Mark Hamilton (Sydney Greenstreet)—a psychiatrist, no less!—means to be a snide jerk by continually referring to Dick and Kathryn's marriage as unusually sturdy and good.  It's so sturdy and good, anyway, that after the anniversary party that Mark has thrown them at his house, Dick wrecks the car with all three of them in it, an "accident" but out of what's fairly clearly subconscious intent; whereas when he comes to in the hospital, it's probably not even subconscious when he enquires about Evelyn's fate first, then his wife's, then looks kind of miserable to find that the latter has also come through more-or-less unscathed.  Dick, on the other hand, has been demonstrably scathed: he's messed his right leg up pretty badly.

He is, however, not as debilitated as he's pretending to be—his documented medical condition presently precludes him from even walking, but, although he's stuck depending on a cane, he certainly can—and this creates an opportunity for him to do deliberately what he already tried once on impulse.  He plans a trip with Kathryn to a mountain retreat; he contrives a reason, connected to his architectural engineering firm, that he needs to stay around the house while he sends her on ahead of him; then he catches up with Kathryn in a way nobody else knows is possible; and he kills her and disposes of her body, and car, by way of the cliffside he's already staked out, so that even the crushing of both objects beneath a knocked-loose pile of logs—creating a monument of sorts, somewhat shaped like a star—appears to have been part of the engineer's scheme.  Dick plays the concerned husband—"fortunate" to have his sister-in-law nearby—and it certainly seems like he truly has crafted the perfect murder.  But soon inexplicable events suggest that the most essential element of the perfect murder is missing, and Kathryn isn't dead.  Or—because that seems impossible—Dick is going mad.  Or he's being haunted.  Or, most plausibly, he's being attacked by someone who wants to drive him mad and make him believe he's haunted, though for all he knows that someone could be his own conscience.

Conflict is tight—hell, it's only 87 minutes long—and maybe even too tight: its biggest problem and only serious problem is that it has a compulsive need to tie up every last thing with an unimpeachably logical explanation, so that, by the end, the slipperiness of psychothrills has been replaced by solid ground, and there's not as much woozy mental breakdown as the movie could've supported, and which it has maybe even promised us by throwing a surrealist montage in our faces so early at the moment of Dick's abortive car-crash murder (suicide?) attempt.  (For it is, quite literally, "thrown": the shattered glass/whirlpool effects and the use of aggressive close-ups of the actors, especially Hobart, repeating previous lines of dialogue, but replacing the previous footage with more horror-tinged versions of their recitations, is striking stuff, in both its effect and its filmmaking diligence.)  As it goes, though, there's a lot of great paranoia as reality does, indeed, seem to crack around Dick.  Objects associated with his wife—rather, his wife's corpse—reappear inexplicably; eventually, so does what looks like the woman herself.  There is, ultimately, a superlative hobble-legged pursuit through the streets and into an empty apartment* that sends Dick off after a phantom wearing Kathryn's distinctive green suit and curiously old-fashioned feathered hat; Bogart's painful ascent of the stairs and his bug-eyed investigation of the completely empty and uninhabited apartment are terrific, and this is the big thing here that the movie doesn't have any actual need to eventually explain with "logic," so it bummed me out that it wasn't a hallucination, tantamount to a ghost, whether ghosts are "real" in this movie or not.  The logic isn't as airtight as all that anyway: it'll turn out to have required a pretty damned wide-ranging conspiracy, numerous potential leak points, and a whole lot of man-hours; on the other hand, the one detail that Dick turns out to have overlooked is so microscopic to us that, even though the movie's done nothing to hide it and has always played fair about it (even if it hasn't signposted it, either), it's still a fairly big surprise when that error is revealed.

The movie does, for the most part, play extremely fair; the most preposterous thing might simply be the social impossibility of Dick ever believing that he could actually land Evelyn within the rather constrained timeframe that "being the villain protagonist of a thriller, rather than the romantic lead in Sabrina" has allotted him (I mean, it's not even a month).  As a flipped-on-its-head mystery, I suspect that I might've allowed myself to keep too open a mind about it, personally—I think there's every chance that another viewer could watch Conflict, figure out what's happening and why halfway through, and maybe even get a little impatient with it—but I can't speak for that viewer, and even though there's a few beats that do almost give away precisely where Dick's paranoia's coming from, for me "what's happening and why" managed to remain a hazy and compelling thing right up until the movie spelled it out for me, and I didn't even mind it any more on a second watch.  (It does help, of course, that the misdirects range from the persuasive to the tantalizing—that first time, even with five minutes left to go, I still wouldn't have been confident it wasn't going to conform completely to its "Tell-Tale Heart" template, or, hell, even swerve into a full-on story of the supernatural.)

It is, anyway, always respectful of your intelligence, even if the cleverest thing it does is so incredibly unstressed that I can only take it on faith that it's not merely an accident of its design.  Yet either way, it's still true that Dick is (almost) uniformly making the smartest moves available to him in his situation: he dutifully reports virtually every last detail of the insane shit that's occurring to him, just in case Kathryn isn't dead and is poised to pop back up and accuse him, rather than confirming that he's a man with everything to hide, which would also be bad in the case that his adversary is some third-party human agency.  This is down to Bogart's disciplined performance, too, channeling Dick's guilt-crazed mania into more socially-appropriate channels for a long time before his fear finally boils over.  And as tight as the screenplay is, even as favoring of the plot-mechanical thriller as it is, it's not inhumane, so whether Bogart really wanted to be here or not, that screenplay doesn't give him the chance to make his disinterest obvious, affording him ample opportunity instead for ambiguity and for complicating his vicious murderer into some grayer shades of dark.  Not least are some of the decisions he makes in the third act; but even in the lead-up—and Hobart, whose part is necessarily truncated, is also quite sensitive to her rhyming co-star's wavelength—there's a clear picture of how Dick does know what moral lines he's crossing, and a slight sense that he would rather not even as he does so, particularly an apology to his wife he apparently means.  There's even the possibility that he's trying to be "fair" on his rather reduced terms, secretly giving Kathryn chance to change his mind.  But Bogart is also just providing good proper villainy, presenting himself as an object of considerable nascent threat for cinematographer Merritt B. Gerstad to drape in gloomy shadows or for editor David Weisbart to snap to for a nice jolt.

And I haven't spoken, till now, of how well this has been put together by its craftspeople, from director Curtis Bernhardt on down to costume designer Orry-Kelly and composer Friedrich Hollander (the former arguably getting more to do just with Hobart's plot-crucial outfit than most black-and-white noir costume designers got with entire movies, and the latter feeling like he's scoring for bigger swathes of the movie than most 40s film composers got to do).  But it is, principally, Bernhardt and Gerstad: this is a gorgeous movie, and a technically-refined one: the camera is very mobile (above all as we chase Kathryn's ghost through Dick's point-of-view) but not ever aimlessly busy, and Bernhardt's ensuring that the vast majority of his thriller is at a low boil so when it does bubble over, it's shocking.  I'm honestly a little surprised that Bernhardt is so adept: nothing I've seen of his really would've guaranteed such strong thrillmaking, and my main data point would've militated in exactly the opposite direction; his most famous movie might be the lousy 1947 Joan Crawford vehicle Possessed (which otherwise, albeit confusingly, has nothing whatsoever to do with 1931's most excellent Joan Crawford vehicle Possessed), and that would've made me nervous if I'd remembered it, since Possessed is also a thriller inflected by 1940s psychiatric scientism, but unfortunately a thriller that has no idea how to dovetail that genre into its actual purpose, which was to get Crawford awards attention for some uncharacteristically loud and histrionic acting.  This is the opposite of that set-up, I guess: a performer who wasn't that enthusiastic but, even so, had exactly the right vibe for the material, and a script "about psychology**" that knew which side its bread was buttered on, so Bernhardt, a veteran of the German industry (which he abandoned in 1933 for reasons you can guess), has every opportunity to soak his movie in doom and self-destruction.

Gerstad is clearly the secret sauce, though; he'd been Tod Browning's guy years earlier (notably on Freaks and my favorite Browning film, The Thirteenth Chair), though this is vastly more sophisticated stuff.  (Which makes it all the more puzzling—even disappointing—that this was Gerstad's final film, with a retirement that persisted for three damned decades till his passing, all the way out in 1974.)  There are the normative inky blacks of a movie of this type—awfully well-done ones—and between him and Bernhardt, quite a few wonderfully disorientingly acute angles and threateningly claustrophobic compositions (not to mention a number of shadowplays performed across walls and floors, because I don't suppose you would be working at Warners and fail to notice what Michael Curtiz is doing just next door).  But the real loveliness of the film, and I would call it loveliness even in these circumstances, is the ethereality of Gerstad's ideas about the lonely mountain road where Kathryn dies, and to which we eventually must return, combining studio shooting and matte paintings and a startlingly large set courtesy of art director Ted Smith, that feels like it's too big to be studio shooting and matte paintings, or at least the budget-conscious versions of those things, thus lending it an uncanny cast already.  Even in the "daytime" it's a misty and isolated expanse; but for darkness, Gerstad has arrived at a singularly effective "light-for-night" strategy that sounds like it ought to be self-defeating, but looks amazing—more-or-less visible spotlights backlighting the trees, and Bogart, and casting long "moonlight" shadows down a violently steep hill—and it's a straight line from here to, say, an alien abduction episode of The X-Files.  If nothing else in the movie were pushing it at all, this alone would be enough to make the possibility of lingering ghosts and haunted ground feel real; in a movie that's at least been pushing that aesthetically with every fiber of its being, there's no more perfect place it could have ended.

Score: 9/10

*Or, as the movie say, "a flat."  This American script very clearly set in America can get randomly and unaccountably English; Bogart also bizarrely refers to a man as a "chap."

**And is equally metacommentary, Greenstreet being provided a monologue that's as much about how audiences relate to stories about the perfection the act of murder demands as it is about any Freudian psychoanalysis of our villain.