Wed 23 Jan 2019
A Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: THE CONSPIRATORS (1944).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews[5] Comments
THE CONSPIRATORS. Warner Brothers, 1944. Hedy Lamarr, Paul Henreid, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Victor Francen, Joseph Calleia. Based on the novel by Fredric Prokosch (Harper, 1943). Director: Jean Negulesco.
Marketed on DVD as part of Warner Brothers’s Film Noir Archive Collection, The Conspirators isn’t really what most cinephiles would consider to be film noir. This film doesn’t take us down Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley†in the way that the grittier Columbia and RKO releases of the late 1940s do. Yes, there’s a protagonist who is caught up in a web of deception and is falsely accused of murder. And there are cinematic shades and shadows thanks to director Jean Negulesco. But the overall flavor of this espionage thriller is more “romance in wartime†than an unforgivably capricious world spiraling out of control.
Paul Henreid, who in real life was an avowed anti-Nazi, portrays Vincent Van Der Lyn, a member of the Dutch resistance who flees to Lisbon, Portgual. The Gestapo on his trail, Van Der Lyn is set to sail from Lisbon to England where he will rendezvous with the Dutch Air Force. By a sheer happenstance, he ends up getting mixed up with the personal and political affairs of one Irene Von Mohr, a beautiful and mysterious French woman (Hedy Lamarr) married to a Nazi official.
Throughout the film, both Van Der Lyn and the audience are forced to wonder where Irene’s loyalties lie. It is clear that Van Der Lyn is quite smitten with her. Unfortunately, these romantic scenes are by far the weakest part of the picture, a fatal flaw when the characters’ romance is supposed the core of the film. There’s something so dated, so artificially tender about them. And the dialogue between the two would-be lovers is noticeably forgettable. Casablanca (1942), with its famously quotable lines, this is not.
If Henreid and Lamarr, the two top-billed stars of the movie, don’t captivate one’s attention, it doesn’t necessitate that The Conspirators isn’t worth watching. Far from it. The supporting cast is, in a word, outstanding. There are some great character actors showcasing their work here. Even though they don’t get nearly as much screen time as Henreid and Lamarr, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet simply steal the show. Lorre, too short and too “ethnic†to be a leading man in a Hollywood romance, takes the role of Jan Bernazsky, a Polish resistance fighter who discovered an ingenious method to kill Nazis.
Sydney Greenstreet, reunited once again with Lorre, portrays Ricardo Quintanilla, the ringleader of an anti-Nazi conspiracy. Flamboyant and determined, Quintanilla ends up being a far more compelling character than Van Der Lyn (Henreid). Joseph Calleia, the Maltese born actor who had notable roles in The Glass Key (1942), Gilda (1946), and (later on) A Touch of Evil (1959), likewise overshadows Henreid. He portrays a Lisbon police inspector who is alternatively convinced and skeptical that Van Der Lyn is a murderer.
These three fine actors, when they are on screen, lend the film a world weariness that serves as a most welcome counterpart to the film’s maudlin romantic elements.
January 23rd, 2019 at 7:30 pm
A Greenstreet and Peter Lorre film that I’d never heard of before, much less never seen? When Jon told me he had a copy of this film and was watching it, I couldn’t believe it.
A must see, as far as I’m concerned. Hedy Lamarr is only a bonus.
January 23rd, 2019 at 9:04 pm
The novel by Frederic Prokosch was a near best seller that launched a long and well received career that encompassed numerous successful novels including NINE DAYS TO MUKSALA and THE MISSALOUNGI MANUSCRIPT.
THE CONSPIRATORS is very much a shot at recreating CASABLANCA, and misses that mark by great lengths, but it isn’t a bad film and has it’s moments, certainly when Greenstreet, Lorre (Negulesco did much better by them in MASK OF DIMITRIOS, which also features Victor Francen), and Calliea are on screen. Hedy Lamarr has my attention in almost any role.
Though it is more literary (not literate),the novel is very close to not only Eric Ambler, but the kind of thing Martha Albrand and Helen MacInnes were writing in the same era, though Prokosch was more a serious novelist than a thriller writer per se (though I like the book it compares poorly to all three of those writers at their best by being a bit too aware of its literary pretensions).
But like the film, the book is worth the effort.
January 23rd, 2019 at 11:17 pm
Lorre and Greenstreet have big roles in the Ambler-derived The Mask of Demetrios. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if putting them together as a double act might have been thought a good-selling point for 40s noirish films. They turn up in a surprising number of films.
Whether Prokosch himself was a “serious novelist” is questionable. He wrote about countries he never visited and his memoirs were revealed to be lies – very carefully put-together lies, but still lies. I remember reading an account years ago and thinking they sounded interesting, so I’ll have a look at them now.
January 23rd, 2019 at 11:53 pm
Roger
This may be what you’re referring to. From his Wikipedia page:
“The publication of Voices: A Memoir in 1983, advertised as a record of his encounters with some of the century’s leading artists and writers, returned Prokosch to the limelight. His early novels The Asiatics and The Seven Who Fled were reissued to much public acclaim. In 2010, Voices was shown to be almost wholly fictitious and part of an enormous hoax.”
January 24th, 2019 at 8:25 pm
I did point out Prokosch aspired to being a literary writer, and his books did sell well enough to be reprinted in paperback and be well reviewed.
As for any aspect of con game involved, it is hardly new among writers, even some well received ones like Baron Corvo, Patrick O’Brien, L. Ron Hubbard, Karl May, Talbot Mundy, and Clifford Irving. May and Mundy were both professional swindlers earlier in their career. Even O’Brien’s biographer despaired at all his unsubstantiated claims and phantom life.
Serious Novelist does not preclude a certain loose relationship with the truth. and critics did praise and admire Prokosch’s work. Anyway I was only suggesting Prokosch viewed himself and his work as a mainstream novelist and not an entertainer or thriller writer. It may be a subtle difference today, but in his time there were very clear lines, so clear that for most of his career Graham Greene separated his serious work from his “entertainments” as John Buchan had once separated his novels from his “shockers.”
And most writers write fiction about places they have never been and aspire to convince their readers they are writing from experience. The mystery genre in particular would be much less populated if everyone who wrote in it had to actually have experience with crime, detectives, murder, spies, and the like, and while I enjoy the Hammett’s and Ian Fleming’s I also like the Carter Brown’s and John Creasey’s who did much of their traveling with a Baedecker Guide.
Even Hemingway. king of the write what you live school, had Nick Adams, his fictional alter ego. think in one story “anything he ever wrote that was any good was made up.”