Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Robert Joyner The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

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.

Marlburian This is a disappointing film, with two high spots: the fight Cooper has with the Ovra agent, and Lilli Palmer. (Despite the opening credits state "Introducing Lilli Palmer", she had been appearing in films since 1935.)She's great to look at, and is pretty good at negotiating rough ground (such as the four miles to the aeroplane) in high heels.I don't always rate Cooper as an actor (though he was great in "High Noon"), and he's bit old for such spy capers, but his range of facial expressions when he's told to lie low with Lilli is worth replaying several times. But then the film slows right down for a bit of romance and soul-bearing by Lilli, until the action picks up again.Incidentally I can just about accept that Cooper might have been allowed to go to neutral Switzerland, though surely with a minder or two. But anyone with knowledge of the Manhattan project (applied in a very basic laboratory, as we see at the beginning) would not not have been permitted to risk himself in Italy, especially after he had been detected by German agents in Switzerland.It's nice to see the RAF get a look in at the end, when it's one of its planes that lands in Italy. Subsequent American film-makers would probably have made it an USAF plane.

JD Ralston If you cut this movie in half it would be tolerable. Gary Pooper is awkward and painful to watch. The middle section of the movie when Cooper and Palmer are hiding out in France has a slight "Casablanca" feel. It's the only part of the movie that didn't make me want to smack someone. Palmer is the poor man's Bergman and I won't even mention that Pooper guy in the same sentence with Bogart. Yuck what a waste of time. Fritz Lang directed this tripe? This is the same guy who gave us M and Metropolis? It was made by United States Pictures and the best I can figure is that it was a propaganda attempt. Cooper was just awful but the story and writing didn't help any of the other actors either. The writing is so bad it's embarrassing. If this was Coopers only movie I would link him with Dan Duryea as the bottom of the barrel in black and white pictures. I watched this because I thought it was a noir picture. It is not. I would call it film no. As in no don't watch it.