1944. The Conspirators is a tale of romance, intrigue and adventure set in Lisbon and revolving around a group of refugees from the Nazis. Hedy Lamarr, on loan from MGM to Warner Bros, is Irene Von Mohr, a resistance fighter.
The movie is a disaster from beginning to end. Production is a mess – echoes here of the tortured travails on and off the set of I Take This Woman. The original producer, Hal Wallis, is fired by Jack Warner, footage is dumped and reshot, and the script is rewritten. Behind the scenes, the film is known as The Constipators, with Headache Lamarr and Paul Hemorrhoid according to director Jean Negulesco.
To make matters worse, The Conspirators is pretty much a Casablanca rip-off featuring a similar plot-line (anti-Nazi intrigue), a number of the same actors (Paul Henreid, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre), music by the same composer (Max Steiner) and cinematography by the same cameraman (Arthur Edeson).
The Conspirators is savaged not only by the critics but also by Frederic Prokosch, author of the novel on which the movie is based.
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