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.
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.
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.
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.