Cornered (1945)

Just what I expected

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

This film features a complex and confusing plot that captures the situation of postwar revenge on levels that range from personal to geopolitical. My summary heading approximates what World War 2 Canadian Air Force pilot Laurence Gerard (Dick Powell) says to Senora Camargo (Nina Vale), that she knows who Gerard is and why he's in Buenos Aires. He's there to find the mysterious Jarnac, a Vichy French collaborator and dedicated Nazi sympathizer who murdered Gerard's French wife, whom Gerard had married after having been shot down on a mission over occupied France and rescued by Resistance fighters. Gerard doggedly (emphasis on dogged) returns to France, picks up on a trail that leads him to Buenos Aires, involves himself in the postwar search for Nazis in Argentina, and finds out the fascists still cling to the hope of eventual world domination. All Gerard wanted was to kill Jarnac (Luther Adler), who appears in the film's last minutes as a memorably sleazy, demented character. Powell's portrayal of Gerard seems annoyingly stupid, an idea to let the character evolve as the plot thickens. By the end he's vintage Dick Powell of the "Murder My Sweet" mode.

Dick Powell plays a Canadian pilot who returns to France at the end of WWII to find his wife was executed by the Vichy government, along with other French patriots. The man who ordered the execution is believed to be dead, but Powell doubts that and sets out to track him down. The trail leads him to Argentina where he finds himself surrounded by enemies.Noirish revenge drama starts out strong but falters due to a lead character with little intelligence, an overly talky script, and running on about 15-20 minutes more than it should have. One of those movies where the villain catches the hero and, instead of killing him, just talks and talks until it inevitably bites him in the rear. Still, it's Dick Powell playing a tough guy and that's always worth a gander.

Directed in crisp, no nonsense direction by Edward Dmytryk with plenty of tough dialog and ambiguous bad guys, CORNERED gave Dick Powell a chance to play the kind of tight-lipped role that would have been offered to Alan Ladd if this RKO film had been made at Paramount.In Ladd's laconic style, Powell is a Canadian flier seeking to find the identity of the man who was behind the killing of his wife in France toward the end of WWII. He goes on his mission while making serious blunders about the innocence or guilt of everyone he encounters along the way. Nevertheless, despite the fact that he can't trust villainous Walter Slezak who befriends him, he does manage to nail the culprit in time for a satisfying conclusion. Luther Adler is fine in what is essentially a bit role in the story's final scene.It's competent but hardly inspiring or original. It passes the time as a film noir of moderate interest with a good tough guy performance from Powell, who kept reminding me of the sort of anti-hero Alan Ladd was in his early films at Paramount such as "This Gun for Hire" and "The Glass Key." But "Cornered" is not quite as effective as those Ladd films.

If you liked Dick Powell as the hard-boiled private detective in "Murder My Sweet," you ought to enjoy his performance here because he plays essentially the same chitinous snoop. Where Philip Marlowe was bopped on the head in the earlier film and the narration told us, "A black pool opened at my feet and I fell in," we got to see the black pool and Powell falling in it. In "Cornered" Powell is bopped on the head and, voicelessly, instead of a black pool opening at his feet, it seems that a shimmering set of venetian blinds or louvres is slowly lowered as the darkness overwhelms him. He's knocked out twice later but the effects are absent. Both films are fast paced and Powell in his dark flat-brimmed fedora strides purposefully through them.There are, however, differences between the two movies. "Murder My Sweet," for all the confusion in its two semi-independent plots, is full of colorful characters and a true sense of place. It's exciting. "Cornered," on the other hand, strives mightily -- almost desperately -- for the same qualities and largely fails.It's a revenge story. War airman Powell is discharged from a hospital after the war, and after discovering that his French wife of twenty days has been executed on the orders of a traitorous Vichy bureaucrat named Jarnac, who has since disappeared, presumed dead.He is of course quite alive and Powell pursues him through acquaintances, two-faced friends, and minor clues through France to Buenos Aires. Kids, Buenos Aires is a big city in Argentina (that's in South America) and it's full of Europeans, including a lot of Germans, and among the Germans in the post-war years were a nest of ex-Nazis and collaborators who found in the metropolis a more congenial atmosphere than existed at the time in France or Germany.Powell goes through the usual motions of the private eye. He walks down streets, through parks, is followed by footsteps, discovers strangers in his bedroom, is lied to by informants, treats everyone with suspicion, waves a pistol around and has pistols waved at him in return, questions so many characters of varying temperaments (sobbing, arrogant, sneaky, comical, guarded) that I soon lost track of who was who. The sets are studio bound. If there was a scene shot in daylight, I missed it. Dick Powell almost always needs a shave. There is a violent climax, which was fine with me but not much of a reward after all the boredom.And the title is one of those generic titles that could mean anything -- "Cornered", "Dark Footsteps," "Footsteps in the Dark," "Fatal Vision," "Basic Instinct," "Fatal Instinct," "Basic Vision," "Fatal Basic Instinctive Vision," "Somewhere in the Night," "Out of the Night," "Out of the Closet," "Please Don't Hurt Me Mister," "A Dummy's Guide to Collecting Lingerie" and "Who Put This Merry-Go-Round Inside My Head And Why Can't I Get Sirius On it?" In some ways the most gripping feature of the movie are the exotic names -- Jarmac, Regules, Camargo, Incza (who thought THAT one up?), Satana, Perchon, and the rest. An insurance man is played by an actor named Egon Brecher. An actor should have played a character with that name, not the other way around.