"I have a feeling this is going to be the beginning of a beautiful hatred."

Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck were two huge movie stars. They also happened to be under contract to Warner Brothers for many years. It is amazing that they only made one movie together. That being The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947).

The movie has been dismissed by most critics. Bogie plays a painter who lives in England. He doesn’t even try to use an English accent. Neither does his creepy daughter from his first wife or his new wife, played by Barbara Stanwyck. Basically they are act American because that is what their audience expects them to be and the setting was moved to England because the director thought the scenery would go better with the story.

Basically the story involves Bogie painting his wives as the Angel of Death before killing them with a glass of warm milk. Suspicion (1941) this is not. It is not as good as the Hitchcock movie, but for someone who is a fan of Bogie and Stanwyck, this does not matter.

Bogie has a wife in the city. He also has a daughter, but he has fallen for a rich woman from the country played by Stanwyck. So Bogie paints the first Mrs. Carroll as the Angel of Death and then kills her. He takes himself and his daughter to the countryside where they are to live happily ever after. That is, until Bogie gets other ideas about the new Mrs. Carroll. She seems to have the hots for one of her former childhood friends. Bogie doesn’t like this and he doesn’t like him. Unlike in future roles, for instance The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) or The Caine Mutiny (1954), we don’t see the slow decent into madness. This might be why those two movies are superior to this one. But really if the man will kill his first wife -- he is probably already mad, so there would be nothing to descend into.

I have always been a fan of Barbara Stanwyck. She could be tough in movies, Double Indemnity (1944), but she could also be sexy, The Lady Eve (1941). Through it all though, it seemed like she always played a conniving woman. Here she doesn’t do that. She is the loving housewife and is actually pretty stale when you compare her character here to the other ones of her career. It doesn’t matter; it is still Barbara Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart on the screen together for their only time.

Watching this makes me think of what might have been. Stanwyck and Bogie would have made a great team in a real film noir. Instead of putting murder in the countryside among the rich, they would have been a lot more successful playing characters in the dark alleys of any major American city.

The typical Stanwyck character would have meshed well with the typical Bogie character. Both were smart, witty and pigheaded. We see none of that here. It is a huge disappointment considering the talent of each actor.

Of course it could have been worse. The two might never have made a movie. There were many talented people in Hollywood’s Golden Age who were at the same studio, but were never assigned to the same picture. Alfred Hitchcock is my favorite director. He once remarked that he enjoyed the subtle acting style present in actors like Humphrey Bogart. The two were at Warner Brothers during the same time period. Even if they weren’t, the two could have come together through another studio as each was big enough to dictate some terms of the movies they made. I don’t know if Bogie and Hitch would have gotten along. But I do know that the two had enough box office draw to make whatever they produced a success. Bogie could have been the perfect foil to James Stewart or Cary Grant in a Hitchcock picture. It just was never to be.

At least film fans get to see Bogie and Stanwyck on the screen together, even if they have not been cast to their strengths.