SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

davidcarniglia What a great plot in this noir thriller. Bogart gives a superb performance as an unloved husband who kills his wife so he can be with his sister-in-law. But he has two problems: his perfect murder doesn't quite work out, and Evelyn, the sister-in-law, isn't ready to jump into his arms.The result is a series of complications for Bogart's Mason character, culminating in his entrapment by the police and Sidney Greenstreet, as Mason's psychiatrist/friend. Clues emerge quickly. Since we see events from Mason's troubled perspective, we're left wondering if Kathryn, his wife, really is dead, or, more exotically, has come back to life, if only in his mind. In which case he's going nuts.It's interesting that Mason finds himself working closely with the police; you'd think that's the last thing he'd want. He's kind of stuck. It makes sense for him to appear as though he were trying to help find the 'killer'; on the other hand, he becomes so confused, irritated, and suspicious by the succession of clues and coincidences that he feels he has no choice.Greenstreet painstakingly analyzes him, yet he has to maintain the illusion that their psychological conversations are hypothetical. Mason becomes completely flustered when he's unable to pressure Evelyn into falling for him. He's unwittingly acting out the narcissistic profile of the murderer that Greenstreet outlines for him. He's so oblivious to her feelings that he convinces himself she comes back to be with him, not for the obvious reason that she's worried about her sister.He probably begins to hope that she actually didn't die; then at least he can't be accused of murder. Possibly, as Greenstreet wryly suggests, if she lived she could've lost her memory, which would also explain why she hasn't come forward. That would be perfect; Mason couldn't be accused of anything, her tumbling off the mountain road explainable as merely an accident.Even without the murder, he's hardly a sympathetic character. Kathryn has a haughty way with him; when he apologizes for his latent infidelity right after his injury, she assumes he's just being opportunistic. Evelyn toys with him as well; but she is after all much younger than he, and understandably reticent about getting involved with him. In other words, in typical noir fashion, women can't be trusted. As others have noticed, he shows no remorse for the killing, his concern is only to get away with it. And get away with Evelyn. His last talk with Hollsworth shows not only his decency to the man who suits Evelyn much better, but also gives us a look at a younger, less compromised version of himself.Hollsworth's subplot with Evelyn leads in a plausible romantic direction, instead of the tragic path that Mason follows. He's doomed from the beginning.

brekalo_rtf Speak as a Bogart fan must say that this one is for me in the better half of Bogart filmography and I saw many of his films. For me a perfect movie, and I do not understand why this movie has "only" this grade which is very good but for me it has a lot of material and a lot more, I even included it in the Top 250 with no problems. Film style irresistibly draws on films of Alfred Hithcock you believe that a man he did not know the director of the film after watching the same very likely say that this is a Hitchcock movie, I think this is enough said. The script is for a clean 10-house as well as top-notch acting. All in all my film is pure quality and I recommend it to fans of Bogart and those of Hitchcock films.

dougdoepke 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.

robert-temple-1 This is an excellent film noir, featuring a very pert and pretty Alexis Smith as the object of a nasty Humphrey Bogart's lustful obsessions. Good old Sydney Greenstreet is as jolly and quietly scheming as ever. Regarding Smith, who is his sister-in-law, Bogart has 'gotta have her' but has not bothered to ask her first how she feels about that. Not waiting for such trivial information as what anyone else thinks, he hastens to commit 'the almost-perfect murder' of his wife so that he can be free to pursue his fantasy relationship with her sister. Greenstreet notices the giveaway-clue but with his poker face says nothing. This is all good vintage Hollywood stuff. The film was directed by German refugee Curtis Bernhardt, who fled the Gestapo and became one of Hollywood's many Germans, along with Fritz Lang and all the others. The next year, he directed the famous Bette Davis film A STOLEN LIFE. Robert Siodmak, another well-known émigré German director of noirs, wrote the original story for this one. Good expressionist angst.