Conflict (1945)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Conflict (1945) – C. Bernhardt

My PhD supervisor gave me a book called “Psychiatry and the Cinema” (Gabbard & Gabbard, 1987) and it’s a shame that this film is only relegated to a footnote.  Sydney Greenstreet plays a psychiatrist who seems pitched halfway between the Freudian psychoanalysts of yore and the cognitive behavioural therapists of today.  He suggests to Humphrey Bogart that obsessive thoughts can take hold of a person and need to be changed via talk therapy rather than surgery.  Of course, he doesn’t yet know that Bogie has become infatuated with the younger sister, Evelyn (Alexis Smith), of his wife, Kathryn (Rose Hobart) – and when the opportunity arises, when he has the perfect alibi, Bogie does kill Kathryn.  Or does he? Over the course of the second half of the film, clues materialise suggesting that she is still alive since her body was never discovered.  Bogie feels as though he is going crazy as a result which drives him to the story’s inevitable conclusion.  Although Bogie did not always play the good guy, his portrayal of the killer feels a bit more regressive to his earlier heavy roles rather than his more complex and ambivalent anti-heroes of the future (i.e., Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948; In a Lonely Place, 1950). We don’t feel much sympathy for him.  Greenstreet, in contrast, does make for a avuncular and positively framed psychologist – not always the case in Hollywood films of the day.