CLOAK AND DAGGER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 408, 18 April 1947, Page 14

CLOAK AND DAGGER

(Warrer Bros.)

} 1O period romance this, as the title might suggest, but another story about the U.S. Office of Strategic Services whose operatives, because of

the adventurous nature of their wartime jobs, were known familiarly as the "cloak and dagger boys." The film could be dismissed as a highly-coloured, fastmoving, routine spy melodrama of about the same calibre as Paramount’s earlier O.S.S. were it not for two factors which set it above the average. One of these is the direction of Fritz Lange; the other ‘is the acting of Lilli Palmer. Neither of these distinguishing marks is, however, noticeable until the story is well under way. That opening sequence of the interrupted radio message, with the secret agents shot down by the Gestapo before they can get their information across to the O.S.S., plunges us without palaver into the story, and is certainly the kind of thing one associates with Lang; but then it is also the kind of opening that has frequently been imitated and could have been done by any one of a dozen other directors. It isn’t until Gary Cooper, as a mild Midwestern professor suitably fired by the threatened prospect that the Nazis may discover the atomic bomb first, has left his test-tubes and arrived in Europe on his dangerous mission of finding out exactly how much the Nazis do know about nucleur fission-it isn’t until he has failed in Switzerland and gone on to Italy; that one really becomes aware of the hand of the old master, Fritz (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Lang, behind the conventional melodramatics. And ngt until then does one meet Lilli Palmer, as the Italian underground worker who shares romance, danger; and several hiding-places with the professor. Miss Palmer, the foreign actress last seen in The Rake’s Progress with her husband, Rex Harrison, is now in Hollywood and will doubtless soon go the way of all flesh in that place; but at the moment she retains her sincerity and restraint, and with the aid of these two qualities is able to make a moving and credible character out of the hackneyed figure of a heroine torn between love and duty, Part of Fritz Lang’s skill as a diréctor of thrillers lies in his flair for catching our imagination with the incident that is logical, simple, and even natural, yet horribly unexpected in that particular context-the cat’s eyes shining in the dark passage, for example, and above all that scene where the lorry containing the American spy and his Italian helpers, having passed the first scrutiny of the armed patrol, is waved on to proceed. -and stalls, right in the middle of the soldiers. There is a quality of nightmare about that situation, because it is the sort of thing that could so easily happen. Another. good moment of shuddery tension comes when the hero strangles the Gestapo agent who is trailing him. You see the ,dying man’s legs slip from under him (it is all you do see) and straighten out at the end of some stairs; and at that moment a child’s ball starts bouncing down the stairs, with the child after it-a masterly combination of innocent and gruesome elements that is typical of Lang’s technique of direction. Moments like these make Cloak and Dagger considerably more exciting than the average thriller, just as the acting of Lilli Palmer, not to mention that of Vladimir Sokoloff (as an Italian scientist), stands out well above the rather average performance of the film’s official star, Gary Cooper. |