Cloak and Dagger

Gary Cooper and Lilli Palmer on the run in Cloak and Dagger

Fritz Lang's Cloak and Dagger is a routine espionage thriller from 1946. Lang could make the turning of a doorknob suspenseful, which he does here, but the material is subpar. The film's source was a non-fiction book about the OSS. At least four credited writers toiled to turn a sketchy premise into a Eric Ambler type spy yarn and failed. The plot is ludicrous and the players mouth bromides. After a prologue in which we see a French resistance cell being obliterated, Gary Cooper, playing a physics professor at a Midwestern University, is recruited by the OSS to help smash the Nazi atomic program. Lawrence Kasdan must have had this film in the back of his mind when he penned a similar scene for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Cooper first tries to extract a Hungarian nuclear physicist from Switzerland and then is transported by submarine to Italy to aid another beleaguered scientist. There he joins a resistance group that includes Lilli Palmer, Robert Alda, and Dan Seymour. Cooper is given too much expository dialogue and has little chemistry with Palmer. Palmer, in her first Hollywood film, is about as Italian as a Sacher torte, but is game. Alda is more than adequate in a nothing role. Seymour, as usual, fills the background nicely.

By 1946, American filmgoers were tiring of World War 2 flicks. That and the ho hum nature of Cloak and Dagger itself led to a tepid commercial response. Compared to the concurrent Notorious, the film offers a simple minded view of the spy game with none of the ambiguousness and perverse beauty of the Hitchcock film. On the horizon, HUAC loomed. Cloak and Dagger' two principle writers, Ring Lardner Jr. and Albert Maltz, were both part of the Hollywood Ten and were imprisoned and blacklisted. Cooper testified as a friendly witness before HUAC, stating "From what I hear about communism, I don't like it because it isn't on the level." However, he didn't name names and went out of his way to defend embattled screenwriter, Carl Foreman. Carl Sandburg waspishly said that Cooper was "one of the most beloved illiterates this country has ever known."