Cloak and Dagger (1946 Fritz Lang)

More eye-opening violence from Lang... There's a tough fight between Gary Cooper and a Nazi as they go to rescue elderly professor Helen Thimig - then one of the Nazis shoots her, executes her.. It's actually shocking. Later there's another great tough fight with a man in an alley, featuring karate moves, which Lang learned working with OSS advisers to the film. Then a little boy's ball bounces to the feet of the dead man... next minute Cooper's got the corpse propped up, pretending to read a newspaper. It's got good tense scenes, slightly bogs down with romance with conflicted Italian spy Lili Palmer (film claims it's her debut, but she was in Hitch's Secret Agent ten years before; she was German, ironically). Robert Alda is very charismatic as US soldier fighting with them.

Lang shot a completely different ending in which rescued but ailing professor Vladimir Sokoloff dies, then they discover the remains of a nuclear factory, and Cooper says something like "This is Year One of the Atomic Age, and God help us if we can keep this secret from the world..."

Lang was at Warner Brothers for this one (didn't seem contracted to one studio), thus we have a good Max Steiner score and dark Sol Polito images, and a tree I swear I recognised from another Warners picture...

Good pace, generally, good touches, great that the German and Italian is in there properly. A cat, two nuns who aren't nuns. There's something about watching a Fritz Lang picture that's like experiencing a nightmare.

Also I think I can now categorise an archetypal Lang bad guy, from the twenties on - a man in a hat and fully buttoned up coat who has a cigarette stuck in his mouth.

I observed the first time we watched it (December 2011) that it could be a Bond blueprint, down to the score...