Greetings gentle readers, welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today we present Cloak and Dagger, a spy thriller set in WW2 Italy. It was directed by Fritz Lang and stars Gary Cooper.
Reviews:
Letterbxd says:
What it might actually be instead, is an entertaining WW2 espionage adventure with Cooper playing nuclear physicist who goes spy and then killer of fascists whilst attempting to rescue other scientists who are being forced to do brain-work for the bad guys. Along the way he meets resistance spy Gina (Lilli Palmer), and yes, a romance is blended in, but she’s such a wonderfully complex character that you don’t begrudge it.
DVD Savant says:
Cloak and Dagger is a straight and humorless spy story with some good episodes. Novice operative Cooper fools an American double agent in Switzerland but fails in his main purpose, and a good woman dies. He does better in Italy but still comes out with only a middling success — a team of agents is destroyed. Unlike the best Lang pictures, the pacing in this story is off. It begins with far too much talk. When Cooper and Gina later hide out in Italy the confinement in just a few sets puts too much strain on the bigger story. It loses the feeling of context, like a stage-bound television show.
Robots With Coffee says:
I really enjoyed this – whether some of the action beats and twists are predictable, I got a few chills during a rescue or reveal, even if I saw it coming. There’s another reason why: I realized halfway through, and it definitely linked up at the end, that this was an influence/eventually parodied in the movie Top Secret!, one of the greatest comedies ever. Top Secret! is the red headed stepchild of the Zucker Abrahams Zucker comedies that didn’t get a lot of love from audiences, or isn’t as remembered, as Airplane! or The Naked Gun, though in many ways it’s much better. It starts with its amazing homage to Jan & Dean and The Beach Boys, taking Val Kilmer from surfer movies straight into postwar spy films. The love interest is modeled directly on Cloak & Dagger’s Lilli Palmer, right down to her hair and sweater in C&D’s last scene.
I am ambivalent about this film. It’s enjoyable to watch but it doesn’t jell together correctly for some reason. It could have been a compact little thriller but it seems like too many parts loosely glued together. The hero and the story practically teleport from the laboratory to Switzerland to the Italian countryside. Cooper is not a great actor here in my opinion, he is rather wooden. He goes from professor to secret agent with American accented German and no training at all, even killing a man with his bare hands. I frankly expected better from Fritz Lang.
Director: Fritz Lang
Notable Actors: Gary Cooper, Lilli Palmer, Vladimir Sokoloff
Plot (Spoilers!):
Set during WW2, Dr. Alvah Jesper (Cooper), a physicist working for the Manhattan Project, is approached by the Office of Strategic Services. They sign him up and task him with a mission: to contact a Hungarian physicist who was working on a nuclear bomb for the Germans but who escaped to Switzerland. Alvah manages to meet with the physicist but she is soon after kidnapped by the Germans. He uses his charms to befriend an American woman who has become a German agent, then plays hardball to get her to reveal the location of the kidnapped woman. The OSS attempt to rescue the Hungarian but she is shot dead by another German agent.
Alvah had learned from the now dead woman that there is an Italian physicist Polda (Sokoloff) who the Germans wanted her to collaborate with. He is sent to contact the Italian with the aid of the Italian Resistance, one of whom is the comely Gina (Palmer). Alvah meets with Polda but the man states he will only work with the Allies if they rescue his daughter. They agree. Romance blossoms between Alvah and Gina and adventure ensues. All seems well when they learn that the daughter is on her way to be reunited with her father. One small problem: when the woman arrives it turns out that she isn’t Polda’s daughter but yet another German agent who warns them that their safe house is surrounded.
A gun battle breaks out. While the Italian Resistance stay behind to hold off the enemy, Alvah and Gina manage to sneak Polda out an escape route behind the Germans. They barely make their rendezvous with a British airplane sent to pick them up. Alvah and Gina must part ways, he begs her to come along but she states she must stay and fight for Italy. With heart-melting eyes she begs him to return for her when the war is over.
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Gary Cooper “rather wooden?” Bwahhahah!
About a year ago, I watched a film on Netflix (?); supposedly a ‘true’ story. Baseball player recruited into service during WWII, sent to the continent (Italy?) to ‘rescue’ dissident German scientist from ‘behind the lines.’ Success! Of course.
“Catcher was a Spy”, I assume. Long coveted project by Ben Lewin.
https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt4602066/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_Catcher%2520was%2520a%2520spy
Oddly Lewin for this idea could never find funding. Oddly, because it´s a fantastic story.
Based on the book of the same name by Nicholas Dawidoff.
The Catcher was Moe Berg mediocre man for the Red Sox, who decided to work for OSS.
Since he spoke some German and Italian, and was interested in politics and theoretical issues (Princeton Alumni) he agreed to be infilitrated into Switzerland and try to find out if the Germans had a nuke.
Occasion was Werner Heisenberg´s visit to Zurich where his friend was organizing a conference, Swiss nuclear physicist, Paul Scherrer (who built the first Swiss cyclotron).
What Heisenberg did not know was that same friend Scherrer was an asset of Dulles and the OSS in Switzerland.
Berg traveled from Italy where Americans had had a foothold already, to Zurich and made it into Heisenberg´s public lecture but that was of course not on the bomb. Only later at Scherrer´s house there was a Christmas party.
Heisenberg caused ruckus when he articulated hope for the Ardennes offensive to succeed. Several oppositional Swiss, also Dutch physicists were present. Some left under protest. Of course Heisenberg couldn´t talk freely knowing that Gestapo informants could be present.
During these events Berg tried to talk unassumingly with Heisenberg to extract the one info whether the Germans had the bomb or not.
From how Heisenberg spoke Berg could assume that Germany was far away.
The sensationalist detail of Berg´s story was always him being armed with a 9mm. It should serve to shoot Heisenberg should he have the impression there was a bomb in the making.
Of course looking at the bigger picture the mission was a big bluster.
There was no German bomb as by 1942 German bomb development was basically stopped (additionally to the fact that they had never cracked the underlying theoretical issues). Meaning Heisenberg, as head of the theoretical part never understood how the bomb would really work, unlike Rudolf Peierls and Otto-Robert Frisch had successfully figured out in 1940 and with that establishing Tube Alloys.
see Frisch-Peierls Memorandum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memorandum
So the Germans stopped with probing nuke, while it was started in the US. The British knew about the German incompetence and most likely failure e.g. via Berlin-based science journalist Paul Rosbaud, an asset of MI-6 via agent Frank Foley:
The Americans however, a bit paranoid wanted 100% proof of the negative. Of course that also served to scare-monger Los Alamos into finishing the bomb. Because without a German bomb why prepare Trinity?
p.s. fun fact: Heisenberg didn´t know that that man, Berg, who he had met in 1944, had had a pistol in his coat. However mid 1970s Berg published a personal account about his time with the OSS. We know from Heisenberg´s wife Elisabeth that she read (about?) Berg´s book (I forgot whether before Werner Heisenberg´s death 1976 or after).
I would like to see this. Yesterday watched Seven Days to Noon (1950), about an atomic scientist who goes rogue and threatens to blow up London if the government doesn’t stop using bombs for “evil purposes.” There is a manhunt and the military is mobilized to stop him. The black and white photography of London was amazing. Not long after this movie was made, portraying an opponent of the arms race as demented (though with some sympathy) the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, with Bertrand Russell in a leading role, was in full swing.
Thanks for the film recommendation. One I didn’t know.
If you haven’t succumbed to streaming, available in BD format in a three movie set “Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XXI [Cloak and Dagger / Shack Out on 101 / Short Cut to Hell]” from Kino Lorber. From a 2020 4k scan in 1.37:1 aspect. The original mono soundtracks for all three films are presented on lossless 2.0 dual mono DTS-HD Master Audio.
From Peter Bogdanovich´s interview with Lang in “Who the Devil Made it” on “Cloak and Dagger”.
“(…)
Did you have much interference on Cloak and Dagger [1946]?
Yes and no. It was the stupid kind: “Why do you give this man a mustache? No man in Switzerland has a mustache.” I mean, it was just awfully stupid of this producer and therefore very unpleasant work until finally I said, “Look, as long as you are on the set, I will not shoot.” I was wrong—I should have had the intelligence to laugh about it. But the most significant thing in Cloak and Dagger was the ending. It now ends with the Italian scientist being saved by the Underground: the British airplane lands and the American O.S.S. man—who was built around the characteristics of Oppenheimer—has completed his mission; the plane flies away, the girl waves, he waves, and you know they will see each other again after the war.
In the original ending, the Italian scientist dies of a heart attack on the plane and all they have left to go on is an amateur photo of the scientist and his daughter with a very peculiar mountain formation in the background. The U.S. and British secret services get together and they decide, “That can only be in Bavaria.” So they go there—I shot all these things, you know, parachutists, everything—and they find a camouflaged highway and then a big electrified barbed-wire fence. They’re very careful but the power has been cut off. You see, we already knew the Germans had experimented with heavy water to get atomic power—and we knew there was a plant in Norway—but, remember, Los Alamos was still hush-hush. Then there was a conversation and they decide, “Probably the plant is in Argentina now—or somewhere.” A sergeant comes to report that sixty thousand slave workers have been found dead underneath the cave. Gary Cooper walks outside and at the entrance of the cave is a parachutist—an American boy chewing on a blade of grass. The sun is shining, birds singing.
And Cooper says something like: “This is the Year One of the Atomic Age, and God help us if we think we can keep this secret from the world, and keep it for ourselves.” And this was why I wanted to make the picture. The whole reel was cut out. I don’t think it exists anymore.
Do you know why it was cut?
You must ask Warners, I don’t know. Maybe because it was after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The fight between Cooper and the fascist in the alley is particularly frightening because it is so silent, yet so violent.
That was the whole idea of it. I must say I am very proud of that fight. I had the help of two O.S.S. people on the film—Mike Burke and a man named Deihem. In those days very few people knew anything about karate—something was known about jujitsu, nothing about karate. But because I had wanted to go into the O.S.S.—I couldn’t get in because of my eyes—I knew they were trained in what we call dirty fighting. So I did it here for the first time. And all of it, I’m very happy to say, was done by Cooper. He had a double because of a dislocated hip, but I asked him, “Look, Gary, I will be very careful—so and so—and then I can do it in close-ups.” He was very cooperative and there is not one shot in the fight made with the double. Cooper was wonderful—he tried very hard—I liked him very much.
In general, how do you work with actors?
It depends on the actor. I ask him how he feels about the scene; we talk back and forth: “Why don’t you play it like this”—“I don’t like that for such and such a reason …” Maybe he convinces me, maybe I convince him. If he is cast properly, he must have either the ability to play the role, or already have the characteristics of the part. I think a good director gets the best out of the actor. I don’t want to play the part for him and then have him copying me, as many directors do, because I don’t want to have twenty little Fritz Langs running around the screen.
What about working with stars?
The big question is, what is a star? A star doesn’t have to be a great actor, yet there is something. I know actors who are wonderful—like Arthur Kennedy, whom I love to work with—but who, for some damned reason, could never be stars, nor even leading men. There’s something peculiar about a star, something that catches the imagination of an audience. Maybe they’re associated with wish-fulfillments, I don’t know. Personally, I think it is more interesting to work with young actors.
But let’s talk about Gary Cooper; he has his limitations, right? To cast him as a top scientist is already unusual.
When I cast Walter Brennan as a Czech professor in Hangmen Also Die I am casting against image, which, by the way, I like to do. Look at Lorre in M—a child murderer is supposed to have big brows! Gary Cooper has played in so many pictures, and he has certain things that are his alone. For example: “Yup.” Now you don’t have to use that, but you cannot destroy an actor by taking away his so-called personality. You have to use him, but you try slightly to change some things, which I hope I achieved in Cloak and Dagger.
But I was often very wrong. For example, Lilli Palmer in the same film. It was very difficult to work with her. I was very unhappy with her; the producer was very unhappy. I had a big fight with him because I said, “You’ll see—this girl will have the greatest success.” But when I saw this picture in Washington two or three months ago, I realized how extremely good she was in the picture. She has no heart, but that is something else.
(…)”