The New Pictures

Conflict (Warner), in this film, develops chiefly between the edgy performance of many scenes and the plot--which, though basically all right, is much too fancily and obviously worked out. Humphrey Bogart, a grimly unhappy husband, murders Rose Hobart, his wife, for love of Alexis Smith, her younger sister, only to find that Miss Smith has no use for him. In the course of describing just how his wife looked when he last saw her, he makes a single mistake that punctures his otherwise airtight alibi. Since mystery-hardened cinemaddicts can hardly fail to miss his slip, it becomes much too clear, from there on, how and by whom he is being brought to justice. The method: to make him believe that his wife is still alive, by leaving her perfume fresh in their bedroom, her wedding ring in the parlor safe, etc., etc., until he begins to doubt his sanity and makes his second and final mistake.

Prominent in this unpleasant situation is awl-eyed Sydney Greenstreet, a psychoanalyst who explains to married friends who would presumably know a shorter word for it that, according to Freud, "love" is the root of all evil. Physically appropriate as the frigid sister-in-law, Alexis Smith is less persuasive as an actress. On the other hand, Director Curtis Bernhardt and his colleagues exploit such action possibilities as the fierce, desolate murder scene with masterful detail, turn the story's emotions into something more cruel and vivid than a series of plot signposts.

Humphrey Bogart plays the unlucky killer with his usual proficient intensity, and Rose Hobart is bitterly knowledgeable as the hating, hated wife. There is enough talent and ambition involved in Conflict to make another Double Indemnity--which is roughly what its makers were trying for. But the picture is too ornate to be of genuine psychological interest, and too slow to be thoroughly exciting.

Murder, He Says (Paramount) roughly--very roughly indeed--combines the most easily laughable aspects of Tobacco Road, Arsenic & Old Lace, and the ghoul-infested mansions of .Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons. It tells of one difficult evening in the life of a Trotter Poll question-asker (Fred MacMurray) who is investigating refrigeration among rubes and the mysterious disappearance of a fellow-Trotter. Startled when a luminous dog tears through the night woods, he runs afoul of the local Jukes family, whose name is Fleagle. While he twitches around among cattle skulls in the uninviting Fleagle living room, and snags his hand in the twanging spring of a devastated sofa, Mamie Fleagle Johnson (Marjorie Main) assassinates flies with a bull whip, and her third husband, a mad scientist (Porter Hall), suggests that perhaps he'd better knock together another coffin.

Other members of the household are the cretinous twins Bert and Mert (Peter Whitney), their loony little sister (Jean Heather) and--thanks to the toxic ministrations of mad-scientist Hall--a phosphorescent Grandma (Mabel Paige). ("I glow, don't I?" she says proudly.) By her light MacMurray reads about granddaughter Bonnie's great bank robbery; as she dies, the old lady bequeaths him the tune and its doubletalked words which--to the proper person--will reveal the hiding place of $70,000 in bank loot. After that things get a little complicated.

Though it is easily the season's craziest show, and probably the funniest, Murder, He Says lacks much of the ticklish wit and lightness of Arsenic & Old Lace; it lays most of its laughs on with a shovel. But by & large it is a rare old romp, played in specially fine style by Messrs. MacMurray, Hall and Whitney and by the incredibly ferocious Marjorie Main.

That's the Spirit (Universal) climbs likably if loutishly aboard one of the only two "trends" discernible in rudderless current movies. Like Wonder Man and Where Do We Go From Here?, it is a comic fantasy. (The other trend, well represented by Conflict--see above--is crime melodrama with Freudian parsley.)

The pleasant if not terribly exciting idea is to bring hypercorporeal Jack Oakie, an oldtime music-hall magician, back to earth as a ghost to: 1) help his daughter (Peggy Ryan) put her vaudevillian blood into circulation; 2) scare a housemaid (Irene Ryan) by walking invisibly behind her on squeaky shoes; 3) frustrate and reform a family tyrant (Gene Lockhart); 4) try to explain to his own widow (June Vincent) that the "dark lady" (Karen Randle) he walked off with, some 18 years before, was no lady, but the Angel of Death. .

At its heaviest--Gene Lockhart and Andy Devine acting like boys of eight--the fantasy is both unfunny and mawkish. At its best--a flock of ancient socialites helplessly jiving Wagner's Evening Star--it has a weird, wild, death-dance vitality which shows how tame most deliberate surrealism is.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.