Cloak and Dagger (1946)

movie

thank goodness for the old movies...the garbage that is out there today is not worth watching! September 6, 2008

why does everyone think its dated?

i loved the film and the action scenes were well made.i never got the sense it was dated and i enjoyed the film all the way through.gary cooper acted nicely as always and this film is one reason why gary cooper is my favorite actor. September 4, 2008

Clock & Dagger

It was fair. I'm a big Gary Cooper fan, but this wasn't one of his best. It was ok, but after seeing him at his best or his greatest this was alittle disappointing. It didn't really hold my attention that much. I'll share it with someone who likes vintage, but I won't keep it in my library. September 10, 2007

A Now-And-Then Interesting Fritz Lang Film, But Not A Very Successful One

Let's get the bad news out of the way first. And please note that some elements of the plot are discussed. Fritz Lang while in Hollywood made some movies of such variable quality that, for me, it's hard to get a fix on just how good he was, particularly considering the quality and originality of his German films. Cloak and Dagger is not exactly a failure, but it sets up such an unrealistic premise that the movie itself seems not much more than a left-handed exercise by a right-handed man. For instance, Gary Cooper's character, Professor Alvah Jesper, a physicist at Midwestern University, is recruited by the Office of Strategic Services to go to Switzerland. We meet Jesper in his lab working on an experiment...in a well-cut suit, the coat buttoned and wearing a perfectly knotted tie. With apparently no time for training, we meet him again two days later in Switzerland up to his neck in German spies. Substantial stretches of the movie, particularly in the middle, just seem to dawdle along. While the film features an A list star with Cooper, some of the secondary players don't add much interest. And Cooper, 45 when he made the movie, already had that haggard look around his eyes. He could easily have been 55. It doesn't help that the film's female lead, Lilli Palmer, who was 32, could easily pass for 22.

Still, the movie has some high points. The espionage maneuvering in Switzerland played out in an elegant hotel and a mountain lodge is clever and, in the lodge, violent. Jesper's insertion into Italy from a submarine at night and in wet weather builds tension, as does his meeting with Italian partisans and their trip to Rome, hidden in a truck, through checkpoints. The violent confrontation at a country farmhouse between an aging Italian physicist and his daughter is unexpected. And one hands-on fight to the death between Jesper and a tough Italian undercover cop played by Marc Lawrence in a building entrance next to a restaurant, with street musicians playing and singing, is silent and brutal.

The basic story line goes like this. The OSS knows the Germans are working to build an atom bomb but they don't know how far along the project is. A Hungarian scientist, a brilliant mathematician, has escaped from Germany over the Alps to Switzerland. Jesper, a physicist working on the American bomb, is recruited to go to Switzerland and interview the woman. He speaks German and the two know each other. As things would have it, Jesper determines he must go on to Italy to try to talk an Italian scientist into escaping to America. He meets with a number of Italian partisans who help him, including Gina (Lilli Palmer in her first Hollywood movie), and the partisans' leader, Pinkie (Robert Alda). Tentatively, while Jesper and Gina are hiding out together in Rome, a relationship develops. The end of the movie, after partisans hold off the Germans to allow Jesper and the scientist to escape, sees Jesper pledging to return for Gina after the war, and Gina, eyes misting, watches his plane fly off.

If you're a Lang completist or just enjoy WWII espionage movies, this might be something to add to your collection. The DVD picture is just fine. There are no extras. April 13, 2006

This is a race. It's the Germans or us.

As the title suggests, CLOAK AND DAGGER (1946) is a spy movie that fictionally depicts the exploits of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the intelligence arm of the US Army and the precursor of CIA. In this movie director Fritz Lang makes of Gary Cooper a physicist and sends him to Switzerland to find and bring home a foreign scientist who's working on the atom bomb. When that scientist is killed by enemy agents Cooper goes to Italy to extract yet another scientist whose sympathies are with the Allied cause.

There's are some fantastic elements to CLOAK AND DAGGER that made it hard for me to warm up to this movie. Cooper (as Prof. Alvah Jasper) is, we're told, working on the Manhattan Project when the OSS chief picks him because `he'll know what to look for', whatever that means. Maybe it means he can tell the difference between pitchblende and heavy water. You'd think whoever was working on the Manhattan Project was a lot more valuable in the lab than in the field, especially when about all he does, spy-wise, is conduct a friendly kidnapping. Heck, Richard Conte or even John Ireland could do that for you, and at half the price - not that Conte or Ireland are in this one, but this movie doesn't need or add to the luster of a star of Cooper's stature. According to a biography of Lang, CLOAK AND DAGGER was intended to be Lang's warning against atomic research. That would explain why Lang has Prof. Jasper go on and on about the power contained in an apple - why, there's enough energy locked in an apple to blow up this campus! This city, even! C&D was supposed to end with an impassioned anti-atom speech by Jasper which, according to the Lang biography, was filmed and subsequently cut out and destroyed by the releasing company. While in Italian Jasper meets and becomes the charge of pretty young resistance fighter Gina (Lilli Palmer.) Gina might have been able to resist the charms of a Conte or an Ireland, but you don't mix a pretty young with a superstar like Gary Cooper, leave them alone and not expect sparks to fly, embers to glow and flames to erupt. The romantic subplot more or less hijacks half the movie and all the good stuff in the movie happens when Cooper and Palmer are alone. They get the best scenes, including a charming night in a safe house with a forlorn kitten yowling outside the door.

The problem - problems, really - stem from the limp action. Lang handles the foreign agent paranoia stuff well enough. Things ain't what they seem. Carelessly tossed matchboxes or a brace of nuns collecting for the poor can be deadly menaces. There are a couple of well choreographed fight scenes, but the danger never becomes imminent enough and the romance never quite believable enough to work. I think Lang was trying for a lump in the throat when Gina and Jasper share a `We'll always have Paris' scene. That scene leaves one a bit cold, and, as usually happens when such things fail, you resent the director for so blatantly trying to manipulate your emotions. It's probably for the best that the studio loped off the anti-atom ending. One misfire ending is enough for any movie. This one didn't need two of them.

CLOAK AND DAGGER is an okay movie, probably best suited for fans of Gary Cooper or Fritz Lang. I don't know if there are a lot of Lilli Palmer fans out there, but she's the best thing in this one. I'm a big fan of Lang's and I'm slowly completing my collection of his available titles. Lang's deliberate approach to storytelling doesn't bother me much, but this one was a little too slow and diffused even for me. The print is in good condition, the disk contains no extra features.

July 27, 2005

More reviews at Amazon.com ...