Sally Morton (Barbara Stanwyck) is the second wife of artist Geoffrey Carroll (Humphrey Bogart). Carroll’s previous wife died of an illness shortly after the pair met.
The only trace of the first Mrs Carroll is her daughter Beatrice (Ann Carter), and an unsettling portrait her husband made of her.
Life should be good. But Geoffrey seems distracted, both by his work, and another woman (Alexis Smith).
And then Sally falls ill…
Is the second Mrs Carroll to be followed by a third?
After last year, I knew I would eventually check back in with the filmography of Mr Bogart.
A suspense melodrama in the mould of Gaslight, The Two Mrs Carrolls sounded like an interesting re-entry point.
No use delaying it: this movie is bad. It took me a few goes to actually finish it, and there were too many points where I lost track or got bored and had to rewind the film for things I had missed.
Something is off from the beginning.
The critical consensus seems to be that Bogart is miscast. That is an understatement.
The whole movie is miscast, down to the
Straight out of the gate, Stanwyck is off - the accent can be forgiven, but she has nothing to do as the pure white Sally. Stanwyck is so innately intelligent and strong-willed, the character feels like caricature of the helpless damsel.
The script seems oddly structured for a suspense movie - we meet our central couple in medias res, in the fresh bloom of romance.
But we never get a sense of the relationship - the whole movie is on fast forward, blowing through any chance to let the characters breath, and for actual suspense to build.
We never meet the original Mrs Carroll - she dies in a cut and then we cut forward to Sally, married and content.
The writing is god awful, full of exposition which is deployed in the wrong places.
There is no tension and no sense of stakes. And because the film is so similar to Gaslight and other Bluebeard narratives, it just feels pointless. About halfway through I started daydreaming about a gender-flipped version of the story, with Stanwyck as the homicidal artist and Bogart as the hapless victim.
Hapless is pretty good word for Bogart. He seems checked out, or unsure of how to convert the character’s pathology. He is not as bad as I was led to believe, but he never convinces as either a lover or a murderer.
The major culprit for the film’s failure is director Peter Godfrey.
The film is shot so perfunctorily, with poor blocking and undumanic compositions.
The film is just static, and cannot even lean into the gothic atmosphere the script is clearly demanding.
The only scene with any juice is the reveal of the second Mrs Carrolls’ portrait.
The camera stays on Sally’s face as she approaches the portrait, and the delayed cut to her grotesque doppelgänger is genuinely shocking.
It is rare that a film manages to create an in-world piece of art that provokes the same reaction the characters have, and Sally’s painting is worth the slow tease.
It is a pity the rest of the movie cannot match it.
Thematically the film has potential - a man externalising his misogyny into art, using women as muses until he runs out of inspiration and then destroying them via canvas and murder.
There is something to be unpacked there.
But if you want to watch a Bogart movie about a self-destructive artist in a doomed romance, you are better off with In a Lonely Place.
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