CONFLICT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 389, 6 December 1946, Page 32

CONFLICT

(Warner Bros.)

EIGHO! Here we go again; all set for murder, with a psychologist in the foreground to take the place of the once-indispensable but

now-outmoded detective and direct our attention (quite unnecessarily, «since it is so obvious) to the "one little slip" which mars the otherwise perfect crime committed by an engineer named Mason, Mr. Bogart plays this homicidal fellow and it is rather difficult to know whether he is actuated mainly by an illicit passion for his young sister-in-law (Alexis Smith) or by the nagging of his wife (Rose Hobart). Pefhaps because it is at least partly the latter, one is led to feel a certain amount of sympathy for him, especially as it immediately becomes clear that he hasn’t’a dog's chance of getting away with the murder of his wife, in spite of all his clever planning. I am sure that nearly everybody in the theatre must have noticed

his slip as soon as he made it, and this of course gave us all a nice comfortable feeling of superiority and added to our sympathy for the engineer as he grew more and more bewildéred and_ frustrated because things weren’t working out right. ‘ IT have seen Humphrey Bogart in-many better roles ‘than this, but he certainly has the ability. to look thoroughly harassed; and that’s perhaps the chief requirement in this portrayal of a man who, haying taken infinite pains to dispose of his wife in circumstances which clearly point to accident, and: being all set to take advantage of his freedom (he already has plenty .of money),. keeps finding most disturbing evidence that the dead woman is apparently still alive; either that, or she is. really dead and haunting him, The person responsible fot spoiling his uneasy utopia is Mr. Sydney-er-Greenstreet, portraying the. psychologist who traps the crimjnal into giving himself away’ by playing tricks with- his nerves, Mr.

Greenstreet, we are assured, belongs -to the Freudian school which believes that LOVE. is the source of.all trouble. It is interesting to notice the airy way in which» our screen psychiatrists now chatter about the mysteries of the mind; there is a much greater assumption of knowledge on the part of the audience than there was at the beginning of the psycho-cycle. One of these days soon we may be sufficiently indoctrinated to have Freud quoted at us correctly. But there isn’t much difference, at. that, between sex and love_in Hollywood’s vocabulary. Still, if we’ve got to have this kind of fare, Messrs, Greenstreet and Bogart are as good ‘as anybody at dispensing it. Conflict isn’t a dull picture; it’s just a routine one.