BasicLogic first of all, the screenplay is so stupid and so shallow. a professor without any field training could become involved and acted like double o seven, flew first into swiss, then infiltrated into Italy, it's just such a naive screenplay. the sound track of the music synchronized with every gesture and movement of the actors, so over-the-top dramatic and exaggerated like Walt Disney's cartoons, sometimes very patriotic, sometimes sentimental, Christ on a crutch, givemeabreak. then when the guy sneaked into Italy, all the morons started smoking in the rear of the truck, when met Italian army's road block, the car was stopped, then easily let go, but then another stupid scenario put into play, the truck stuttered and couldn't drive away, then the Italian soldier lifted the canvas, used flashlight to check the back. the soldier must got a flu so serious that he couldn't even smell the cigarettes smoke those morons (including the high i.q. American physicist) just lit up and snuffed out a moment ago. then the stupid music accompanied the movie's actions and tempos going on and on. i don't want to mentioned the stupid arrangement of a beautiful Italian woman, Gina, the change her wet clothes in front of those men. the woman did another clothes changing in front of the American professor again, and warned him not to stare at her. the whole screenplay was just so stupidly drafted with contrived dialog, and the directing was also primitive. but the most annoying thing is the music. Jesus, sometimes even with so romantic violin score. stupid romance during the war, what a drag.

secondtake Cloak and Dagger (1946)More Than a Nazi Spy Film, and Less, TooThere are terrific aspects to this movie, but it's easy to get a bit bogged down at the start, and to flag here and there for the whole first half. Once it hits Italy, and a bit of a formula plot, it picks up steam, including a slightly steamy romance and a predictably dramatic end. It is a deliberate "propaganda" film, really, and it states outright that it is a tribute to the OSS, a 1940s foreign secret service that preceded the CIA. But don't let that bother you...it's not an important element in the drama. What is most striking, politically, is its prescient stance on the bomb. One ongoing problem for me is Gary Cooper, who plays an unlikely American physicist asked to do a highly dangerous undercover job in Switzerland, and then behind enemy lines. Cooper can be strong and calm and silent, and he pulls off the non-GI American with humility and poise. But he also comes off wooden, or worse. Cooper has often had the ability to take powerful lines, or whole dramatic moments, and make them unconvincing or almost destructive by what looks like lack of ability to act. If he is too famous and beloved by to too many people to say he can't act, I still think a red flag is needed here. If Cooper is an acquired taste at best, this isn't Cooper at his best. And he dominates the movie.Outdoing Cooper is the little known Lili Palmer, who had an important role in her next film, Body and Soul. Even though her lines (and her character) are all clichés of sorts, she adds little quirks and dramatic edges that make them work. She's not meant to be an Ingrid Bergman, but more like an Ida Lupino--a woman who can shoot and run, and yet remain a woman. A woman in a man's world. The supporting cast around these two leads isn't bad, not at all, but everyone top to bottom is trapped by a mediocre script, whatever the good intentions.Lang of course is a veteran director who understands dramatic film-making, as well as Europe itself, and in this anti-Nazi film we feel perhaps a tug from his own anti-Nazi past (fleeing Germany in the 1930s and leaving his Nazi-sympathizing wife behind). Politically, there is a strong, even brave, anti-atomic age theme to the movie, including an early impassioned speech by Cooper against the use of atomic weapons. This is just one year after the bombs were dropped on Japan, and the world was still trying to figure out what the atom bomb really meant. Very interesting, clear politics here, and yet it's ostensibly a patriotic film. Overall Lang makes the movie look and sound good, with the help of great cinematographer Sol Polito (Now Voyager, Arsenic and Old Lace) and music by Max Steiner.Another theme which can't be overlooked is a more social one--the romance is really a reason to remind us of the roles women and men are "supposed" to have. War is war, and and in 1946, women and men can go back to what they had been doing before--including getting married and having kids (the scene in the old carousel is a suggestive example here). This underscores the bond and the conflict of Cooper and Palmer, a pair of ordinary people sucked into the high drama of war but wanting only a peaceful world where they could do ordinary things like fall in love without fear.There is actually a lot going on here. Watch for its strengths, and keep your expectations in line.

ferbs54 Inspired by the wartime exploits of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA, Fritz Lang's "Cloak and Dagger" (1946) tells the story of Alvah Jesper, a mild-mannered physics professor at a Midwestern university. Jesper is "hired" by the OSS to go to Europe at the tail end of WW2 and investigate Germany's development of the atomic bomb. (Hmmm...a mild-mannered, Midwestern university professor fighting Nazis during WW2...why does that seem so familiar?) Jesper, played by Gary Cooper, travels to Zurich and fascist Italy, winds up helping two fellow physicists who are being used by Germany, and becomes involved with a pretty Italian underground courier, Gina, feistily portrayed here by Lilli Palmer. (Curiously, although the film's opening credits say "And introducing Lilli Palmer," she had appeared in dozens of films before this one. What's up with that?) The picture features a fair amount of suspense and paranoia; indeed, not even nuns can be trusted in the web of espionage that Prof. Jesper finds himself caught in. Although it slows down a bit in its midsection, when Alvah and Gina are hiding out in various (not-so) safe houses, the viewer's brief patience is soon rewarded by the film's highlight: a brutal fight between Cooper and an eye-gouging OVRA agent (well portrayed by the perpetually slimy character actor Marc Lawrence); a tough, dirty and realistic battle to the death with only the sound of a street singer as accompaniment. I would imagine even Hitchcock applauding this bravura sequence. Expertly directed by Lang for maximum tension and featuring still another rousing score by the great Max Steiner, "Cloak and Dagger" is quite the winning entertainment indeed. Bottom line: If you want to see Cooper in what almost amounts to a proto-James Bond role--and he does acquit himself quite credibly--then this picture is for you.

bkoganbing The obvious criticism of this film is that Gary Cooper is just too much an American type to be engaged in espionage in Nazi occupied Europe. Who was Fritz Lang kidding here? It's the same problem the horribly miscast Henry Fonda had in War and Peace.Of course the reason Cooper was on such a mission was that he was an atomic physicist and the OSS borrowed him from the Manhattan Project for a little espionage. His mission was to check on an atomic scientist who was known to be working for the Nazis and is now in a Swiss Sanitarium. So off to neutral Switzerland Coop goes and he essentially bungles his mission, getting into the clutches of beautiful Nazi spy Marjorie Hoshelle. After that it's to Italy to grab Italian scientist Vladimir Sokoloff from the Nazis.The main criticism of Cloak and Dagger is that Cooper is way too American to be convincing. But that can somewhat be explained by the fact as a physicist he has some specialized knowledge that most agents couldn't exactly learn to converse intelligently with other physicists. That being said, I'm not quite sure why these scientists in particular were so critical to either the Allied or the Axis atomic projects.Cloak and Dagger is based on the real life exploits of Michael Burke while he was in the OSS. The film OSS done by Paramount and starring Alan Ladd is a far better film than this one.