Five years in and the marriage fighting gloves are off -- Bogie obsesses over his wife's years younger sister, who was mentioned 'too young' to be dating material when Wife and Bogie first met. Well, she's not now, and Bogie has it bad.What with the atmospheric cabin in fog shrouded mountains, dangerous roads, and Beta Couple Alexis Smith and Charles Drake's melodrama, it's easy to lose sight of the marriage that ends with Bogie murdering his wife. Rose Hobart, playing the wife, has a reserved demeanor that knows her husband very well and for some reason, propriety perhaps, or maybe greed over their accumulations which include a pretty darn nice looking home *with servants, yet!*, will not let him go. She pays for that with her life, perhaps thinking herself invulnerable due to her intelligent reasoning. She proves herself vulnerable in little ways, such as wanting to wear a piece of jewelry because "it goes with the suit", surely a girly way to think, and her hesitant look when leaving Bogie as an invalid, even though he urges her to drive away and flatters her driving ability.This woman cares for her husband, not blindly or romantically, but practically, and a point can be made that she will await his coming to his senses, but he doesn't return to her as her partner in any way. He kills her. The movie doesn't show any sort of struggle, it's like she gave up completely upon discovering his deception and he killed quickly, efficiently, with what he thought was a super dee dooper hiding of the wreckage. Oh darn, it didn't work. Nice ghostly touches in the plot that I really enjoyed, not to mention his straining to figure it all out without succumbing to superstition. Good drama.

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).

Likely this 1943-made movie is not better known among Bogart fans because it's more plot heavy than most. Here, the actor is less important than the story, and though Bogie delivers a solid performance, it's pretty much a consuming, one-note plot.Nonetheless, the movie's a gripping suspenser from Warner Bros.— is Mason's (Bogart) wife (Hobart) alive or not. He'd like to romance the younger Evelyn (Smith), but wife Kathryn's in the way. So he arranges a car crash for her that's spectacular with the rolling logs as an epitaph. It's hard to see how anyone could live through it. But then all those tantalizing clues keep turning up suggesting Kathryn's still alive. Mason is slowly going nuts trying to figure things out, while rotund psychologist (Greenstreet) stands by offering advice. It's all done in noirish fashion by director Bernhardt with a first-rate cast—(those foggy mountain road scenes are especially atmospheric, creating just the right spooky mood). All in all, it's 90-minutes of riveting mystery, not the whodunit kind since we know Mason wants to bump off his inconvenient wife. But if you can buy the rather stretched solution, it's a fun ride with old Hollywood hitting on all 8 cylinders.

Have you noticed the similarities between, not only «Conflict» and «Vertigo» (1958), but also with «The Two Mrs. Carroll» (1947)? Indeed, in these movies, there is at least one of the following occurrences : 1) A husband planning to get rid of his wife. 2) A woman who «mysteriously» disappears after entering a building while being followed by a man. 3) A clue that gives away the guilty person (a rose, a necklace). I'll stop here : if you're familiar with the three movies mentioned -- or just curious about the «mechanics» of good suspense/noir films plotting -- then I'll leave it to you to find more connections. You may argue that, since «Vertigo» came after the others, if any «imitation» is to be pointed out, then Hitchcock's film would be the one to «blame». Perhaps.... Yet, none of the other two come close to the first part of «V.», in the atmospheric and hypnotic suggestion of a «romantic ghost».