Walter Huston reputedly said, "I ain't paid to make good lines sounds good; I'm paid to make bad lines sound good." Although Gary Cooper managed to hold his own in a movie based on a repartee-heavy Nöel Coward play (Private Lives) during the early 1930s, by the late 1940s his rate of speech had slowed, which had the effect of magnifying the phoniness of idealist bombast (in "The Fountainhead," a few years later, even more than in "Cloak and Dagger"). Cooper was the epitome of the Strong, Silent Type, better suited to suffer in soulful-looking silence (or to be kicked around and show he could still fight back, as in 50s westerns such as Man of the West and "They Came from Condura").

Cooper's range as an actor did not extend to making high-falutin' speeches about freedom of science, even if one can manage to ignore the recurrent conflation of freedom with American dominance. The theoretical physicist in "Cloak and Dagger" (1946) who also knew lethal techniques for hand-to-hand combat even though he had been sent overseas with no training by the Office of Strategic Services (the World War II forerunner of the CIA) played by Cooper is sent to Europe to thwart the German and Italian work on nuclear weapons and to prevent the open discussion of scientific matters so that the Allies could develop the ideas in secrecy. But the film-makers could not (apparently, for certain, they did not) be honest about wanting to monopolize and exploit science and any technology based on it.

I am very glad that the Axis did not succeed either in general or in developing nuclear weapons, but the double-speak of fighting in the name of freedom (here, specifically free scientific discourse) that is being squelched by those wrapped in the mantle of "freedom" is too familiar six decades after D-Day. Considering the leftist leanings of the screenwriters (Albert Maltz and Ring Lardner, Jr., who would become two of the "Hollywood Ten), the good guys were as surely Soviets as Americans.

The bad guys, the Nazis (there are no Italian fascists in the movie), are almost abstract, compared to the villains of Fritz Lang's two WWII-espionage movies shot during the war ("Ministry of Fear" and Hangmen Also Die). The Hollywood movie star pretending to be a professor going in to Nazi-occupied Europe to snatch away some very old European professor with useful knowledge was already a hackneyed plot motor in 1946. I thought that Fred MacMurray made a more convincing academic in Above Suspicion. Aside from his pronouncements about science (which include and incredibly slilted one about scientific priorities early on), it's impossible for me to accept Gary Cooper as a theoretical physicist associated with the Manhattan Project. He's quite good as a silent killer, but that is completely out of fit with the scientist respected by a German and an Italian physicist regarded as t by the German authorities.

It must have been very strange for Fritz Lang to have directed the archetypal American Strong Silent Type cowboy to pass as a cosmopolitan intellectual speaking Lang's native language. In Lang confidante Lotte Eisner's book Fritz Lang there are no comments on how Lang found working with Coop, but there is the startling information (a) that Lang shot a different ending, and (b) that Lang's raison d'être for making the movie was to broadcast a vaguely Oppenheimerian message about the dangers of nuclear proliferation:

"The ending, a warning against the new-born terror of the spread of the destructive capabilities of atomic power, was Lang's central purpose in making the film, While it was filmed, it was removed, with the entire last reel of the film, by the production company, and was destroyed before the film's release. No complete copy of the film as intended has survived." (p. 267)

This suggests that Lang also had lost sight of his strength: as a director Lang's genius was visual rather than oracular (as an actor is a different story). Perhaps as a non-native speaker of English, Lang did not register how stilted the speeches Maltz and Lardner put in Cooper's (and Lilli Palmer's) mouth were?

The first half hour of establishing the mission and recruiting the Ohio physics professor are dull and credulity-straining. Once the story gets to Europe (Zurich, to be specific), some action ensues, there's a submarine that gets Cooper from Switzerland to Italy, and midway through "Cloak and Dagger" Lilli Palmer is introduced to American audiences — as an Italian resistance fighter considerably tougher than Cooper's character. They more or less mate (as much as the Production Code would allow) while in hiding together (Cooper reprising his romance in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" with Ingrid Bergman).

The ways in which they are exposed are creative, though the getting through (first in the back of a truck, later on foot to get to an impromptu landing-strip) are standard musically amped-up (by Max Steiner) tensions with none of the usual Lang spark. A tunnel and the details of the silent hand-to-hand urban comment show that Lang (and cinematographer Sol Polito, who had filmed Cooper's first Oscar-winning performance, as "Sgt. York( was not completely on auto-pilot.

I like the witty Palmer of later movies more than as the resistance fighter in "Cloak and Dagger," but she was photogenic and could act—as evidenced shortly thereafter in Robert Rossen's "Body and Soul" and in making her stilted speeches sound almost human in comparison to Cooper's delivery.

The DVD has no extras, and the ending remains lost. Even without the last reel, "Cloak and Dagger" drags on too long (106 minutes).


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