The Conspirators (1944)

(On Cable TV, March 2021) I’m not sure why it took me so long to discover this, but Warner Brothers turned out a slew of Casablanca-light movies in the mid-1940s. Most of them took place in Europe, dealt with a combination of often-fictionalized European politics and romance, often featured Nazis as villains, and Casablanca performers as players. The Peter Lorre/Sydney Greenstreet duo alone is a good way to identify the half-dozen films in that sub-sub-sub-genre, and here they are indeed in The Conspirators, a film that sticks far closer to Casablanca than the other films in the same vein. Here, the Lorre/Greenstreet pairing is supplemented by Paul Heinreid and the beautiful Hedy Lamarr as members of a Portuguese anti-Nazi resistance group trying to root out a traitor among them. It’s all fairly familiar stuff, but the cast knows what it’s doing, and so does the Warner Brothers apparatus surrounding them. Lamarr is close to her most glamorous here, and the Greenstreet/Lorre combo is a known quantity as well. Churned out quickly to take advantage of topical events and the American public’s appetite for anti-Nazi material, The Conspirators is, in some ways, an ordinary wartime thriller, but the combination of some above-average elements does make the result more interesting even when it’s clearly trying to repeat a much-better film.