25 May The Conspirators
The Conspirators, WWII Movie starring Hedy Lamarr and Paul Henreid.
(1944) A guerilla fighter known as “The Flying Dutchman” escapes from the Netherlands to neutral Portugal. Paul Henreid plays the role of Vincent Van De Lyn. Once in Lisbon he falls in love with a mysterious stranger played by Hedy Lamarr, often billed by Hollywood as the most beautiful woman in the world.
With Paul Henreid, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in the cast, the comparisons to Casablanca were inevitable. In fact, the movie was first billed as a Casablanca reunion but the other main stars, Bogart & Bergman, were sorely missed. In fact, my favorite wartime movie critic Bosley Crowther panned this picture and called it a “disappointing show.”
All that being said, I enjoyed that the story was based in neutral Portugal, a setting with many similarities to where my parents spent the latter part of the war, in neutral Sweden. The restaurants were filled with curious and secretive characters. Everyone was suspected of being a spy, and most probably were!
One side detail about Ms. Lamarr that I found very interesting is that she was an inventor of a “frequency hopping” technique intended to be used to control torpedoes and prevent them from being detected by our enemies. The idea became reality years later … after the patent had expired.
Related post: Hedy Lamarr
Watch an original trailer on the Turner Classic Movies website.
The Conspirators (1944) at amazon.com
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