CONFLICT: more fighting off-screen than on

If you ever imagined that actors were oblivious to the awfulness of a film they were making and it's only us critics with perception powerful enough to recognise a turd when we see it, then you need to read pages 228 to 233 of Rudy Behlmer's 1985 book 'Inside Warner Bros.'
These pages contain the transcript of a May 6, 1943 phone call between Warner Bros top star, Humphrey Bogart, and studio boss Jack Warner on the subject of CONFLICT. Bogey is pleading with his employer to be released from his obligation to make this film. This is just a sampling:
"I am more serious than I have ever been in my life and I just do not want to make this picture."
"Nothing you can say will convince me it is a good picture, or is in good shape, or for me."
"It is not any good. It is not constructed for me and no thought has been put into it."

In attempting to persuade his recalcitrant star to make the film, Warner alternates between talking it up "In my opinion, from a professional standpoint, this picture.... will be one of the important pictures, because it is so different from anything that you or we have done" to virtually conceding that Bogart has a point "In this business you can't always take the apples off the tree, you have to take some of them that are on the ground" although he denies Bogart's assertion that he (Warner) is admitting "that this is a rotten apple."
Despite Bogart protestations, he made CONFLICT  and while it's certainly not a rotten apple it doesn't do much for his image or reputation either. Bogart clearly had a far better idea of his screen persona than his studio did and he was 100% right to insist that the role was not right for him. It's difficult to understand what Warner Bros were thinking when they cast him in a part that was so at odds with the tough, principled, highly individual characters he'd played with enormous success in 'The Maltese Falcon', 'Casablanca', 'Action in the North Atlantic' and 'Sahara.'
Architect Richard Mason is a scheming, mentally disturbed psychopath who murders his wife when she gets in the way of his lust for her sister and then goes mad when she apparently returns from the dead to haunt him. This is not the Bogart the public had come to love nor was it even an 'interesting' change of direction. Mason is an implausible, one dimensional figure lacking in any kind of appeal. Bogart was far too professional to give a deliberately bad performance but he's obviously struggling to find anything in the script that can help him to make Mason a credible character.
CONFLICT is somewhat kinder on Bogart's frequent 40s co-star Sydney Greenstreet. He's far better suited to the role of family friend and wily psychiatrist Dr Mark Hamilton who figures out what his best friend is up, and he brings a grace and sophistication to the project that it really doesn't deserve. The one real pleasure to be derived from this film is watching Greenstreet in action, effortlessly dominating every scene he appears in without once overshadowing Bogart.
As a thriller CONFLICT is disappointingly flat, unconvincing and anything but an 'important picture', but as a lesson in how a big studio can totally mishandle it's biggest star this film is priceless.