CORNERED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 393, 3 January 1947, Page 24

CORNERED

(RKO Radio)

LL the characters " in Cornered are tough. The only difference is that some are good and tough and others are tough and bad. The good

ones are led by Dick Powell in the role of a former Canadian airman and ex-prisoner-of-war who is trailing the Vichy collaborationist who helped the Nazis to kill his French bride, while the bad ones consist of a bunch of fascist types, including the collaborationist, who have survived the war and who seem to be thriving in South America while getting ready for another attack on democracy. Such an air of desperate purpose pervades the film, the characters are all so obviously leading double lives, and so much of the action takes place in half light or full dark that, apart from the hero, it is extremely difficult to sort

out who is who, or even what is what in thé story. The shadowy photography now so greatly favoured in thrillers may make for artistry, but it doesn’t make for clarity. This is the second shot which Dick Powell has had at this sort of melodrama (the first was in Murder, My Sweet), and he is pretty well on the target again. Wearing a perpetually worried look (not to be wondered at, considering the tight corners he finds himself in), he indulges in hard-drinking, threatening conversation, and various forms of violence, including murder, with as much gusto and competence as anybody, the only real difference between his behaviour and that of the assorted villains being that he is supposedly acting with the best of intentions. When he does finally get his long-sought enemy at bay he starts to beat him up and doesn’t stop till he has reduced him to pulp, the sound-track assisting with some realistic thuds and the-camera blurring the. scene to suggest the hero’s uncontrollable rage. By such devices as these, the director, one Dmytryk, succeeds in giving the film a fairly individualistic style and in creating the impression that it is further out of the rut than it actually is. Clever performances by Walter Slezak and Luther Adler assist the star in creating a general atmosphere of intensity and menace, while certain indi-

vidual scenes are strong in suspense: Yet Cornered is just a little too tough for its own good as a picture. One doesn’t expect such a story to provide light relaxation, but one has the feeling that the director has here put method before material, and that a little more concentration on the essential job of making the plot intelligible would not have come amiss.