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Cloak and DaggerRating:
Release Date: 20 May, 2003 Retail Price: $14.98 OUR Price: $12.99 You SAVE: $1.99! Cast: Complete Cast (9 total) |
Cloak and Dagger Reviews
The Moment He Fell In Love Was His Moment Of Greatest Danger!
Gary Cooper, unusually cast as an atomic scientist, is sent to Europe by the OSS to rescue scientists being forced to cooperate with the Nazi atom bomb project. During his mission, he hooks up with the Italian resistance, falling in love with the feisty Lilli Palmer. Though Lang originally shot his 1946 thriller with more emphasis on the dangers of atomic power, Warner Bros. re-edited the flick, and most of that theme is now lost, reducing the nuclear angle to a mere Hitchcockian McGuffin: a device to get the chase rolling, and nothing more. The middle section of the film is too leisurely for its own good too. On the other hand, there are some very striking sequences as well (such as the sudden execution of one of the scientists), and these moments are worthy of the master.
The case says the sound is 2.0 surround, but you could have fooled me. Two channels may be used, but the effect is entirely mono. The print is in good, but not terrific, shape. The opening scenes have a fair bit of speckling, and the picture judders up and down. The worst of this soon passes, but both problems recur to a greater or lesser extent off and on. Nothing at all for special features.
Very much a lesser effort from Fritz Lang, but his import to film history is such that any release of one of his films is worth checking out.
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.
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