Cornered (1945)

User Rating:

6.8/10   

Director:

Edward Dmytryk

Writers:

John Paxton (screenplay)
John Wexley (story)

Release Date:

25 December 1945 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Film-Noir | Thriller | War

Plot:

On being demobbed at the end of the war, Canadian flyer Laurence Gerard returns to France to discover...

Plot Keywords:

Canadian | Treason | Hunting | Underground Resistance | Revenge

Cast

Dick Powell	...	Laurence Gerard
Walter Slezak	...	Melchior Incza
Micheline Cheirel	...	Mme. Madeleine Jarnac(Laurent)
Nina Vale	...	Señora Camargo
Morris Carnovsky	...	Manuel Satana
Edgar Barrier	...	DuBois, Insurance Man
Steven Geray	...	Señor Tomas Camargo
Jack La Rue	...	Diego, Hotel Valet (as Jack LaRue)
Gregory Gaye	...	Perchon, German Banker (as Gregory Gay)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Luther Adler	...	Marcel Jarnac

Runtime:

102 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound System)

Certification:

Finland:K-16 (1954) | Sweden:15 | UK:A | USA:Approved (PCA #11040)

Company:

RKO Radio Pictures

Quotes:

Laurence Gerard: I'll tell you what. I thought it over and decided not to pay any attention to you.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Crossfire (1947)

Dick Powell in anti-Fascist intrigue in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires enjoyed a vogue (so far as the movies were concerned) in the mid-1940s, providing the locale for Notorious, Gilda and Edward Dmytryk's Cornered. In all three, it serves as a sort of terminal moraine for Nazi refugees from the shambles of the Axis powers.

Dick Powell continues his transformation from lip-glossed song-and-dance man for Busby Berkeley into a five-o'clock-shadowed tough guy, a makeover he had begun the previous year as Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (also by Dmytryk). Here he's a Canadian Royal Air Force veteran who ends up in Argentina, via France and Switzerland, on a mission to avenge the murder of his war-bride wife. He enters a whirl of black-tie affairs in cavernous mansions (those Nazis knew how to party) and a nest of duplicity surrounding the mysterious, and presumably dead, war-criminal-in-chief, known as Jarnac -- the object of his deadly hunt. An at-first bewildering cast of sinister operatives gradually sorts itself out into villains (Walter Slezak the most memorable of them) and members of an anti-Fascist group; Powell, the while, skulks along the moonlit streets of the city in pursuit of Jarnac's "widow."

Dmytryk displays his pioneering flair for noir devices, keeping the atmospherics and tension high. He's let down a bit by the murkiness of the plotting, where the political theme emerges and disappears, leaving abstract stretches of suspense that might as easily have taken place in Boston or Bombay. And it's hard to buy into the convention that, in rooms blazing with gunfire, the red-blooded American will always prevail by means of a manly sock to the jaw. Somewhat dated by its wartime politics and its roots in the international-intrigue genre, Cornered remains a solid piece of work by both Dmytryk and Powell.