Cloak and Dagger (1946)

(On TV, June 2021) In sitting down to watch Cloak and Dagger, I thought I was going to see the 1984 spy thriller (or so the DVR listing reassured me), but I ended up with the 1946 WW2 spy thriller. I’m not complaining — while I do want to see the 1980s film someday, I was only too happy to see Gary Cooper taking on the Nazis and seducing a European resistance member. Based on OSS activities during the war, Cloak and Dagger also touches on the Manhattan Project, perhaps one of the first narrative films to do so. Along the way, it almost invents the James Bond formula, what with its suave agent, world-trotting settings, serial seductions and world-threatening plot in the balance. (If parts of the film feel familiar, it’s because the ending sequence has been parodied in Top Secret!)  Directed by Fritz Lang, you can see how the film is digesting noir cinematography (with many, many sequences set at night) and bridging WW2 propaganda films with later spy thrillers (which, come to think of it, would be a fascinating link to explore). It’s not all that far away from The Third Man or the Greenfield/Lorre geopolitical thrillers of the late 1940s. While I’m not Gary Cooper’s biggest fan, he’s well suited to the role here, gradually evolving from a meek atomic scientist to a dangerous spy (one brutal death along the way) with his usual stoic demeanour. For a film I wasn’t expecting, I found quite a bit to like in Cloak and Dagger, perhaps the most intriguing being the similarities with the Bond formula.