Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

evanston_dad A post WWII snoozer about an American (Dick Powell) investigating the death of his wife. The plot involves Nazi war criminals, shady dealings, European settings that have been turned into rubble by the war, and all of it is pretty dull. It's billed as a film noir, but like so many such films, it's only done so because it's in black and white, was released in the 1940s, and has a strong crime/espionage element to it. But it really doesn't feel like a film noir in any significant way, not in its tone or themes. That wouldn't be a criticism if the film was better, but it's unfortunately long and draggy. Edward Dmytryk, who could show a lot of panache when he wanted to (see "Crossfire") directs with no discernible style here.Grade: C

Neil Doyle 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.

Robert J. Maxwell 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.

robert-temple-1 This film, made immediately after the War, is about fleeing Nazis and Vichy collaborators. They are succinctly described in the dialogue by someone who says of them: 'They don't consider themselves to be defeated.' And that was true of those who escaped. Indeed, the post-War phase of Nazism could be described as the metastasis of Nazism. Deprived of their original host body, Germany, which had finally died as a result of their having infected it, they spread throughout the larger body of the world, like carcinoma cells, lodging wherever they could, and proliferating when possible, aided by all their stolen gold which had been looted from all the capitals of Europe. (A lot of it was smuggled out of Germany in tanks of hazardous chemicals.) Their primary destinations were Switzerland, Sweden, Chile, and Argentina. Switzerland and Argentina are the ones featured in this story, most of which takes place in Buenos Aires (though it is entirely a studio set where everyone speaks English and no one seems to know any Spanish!) The film was directed by Ed Dmytryk, a passionate Nazi-hater who was later black-listed by Hollywood for his left wing sympathies. Because of his long-standing political persuasion, he was that much more alert to metastastic Nazism than most people of the time, who were simply glad for the War to be over and who naively imagined than 'over' meant 'over'. There are a few purple passages in the script which sound as if they were lifted from a political pamphlet. The lead character is played by Dick Powell, a solemn-jowled actor who does not show any humour or even politeness. He plays a demobbed Lieutenant Colonel of the Canadian Air Force who has come out of imprisonment and hospital, slightly dazed and shell-shocked, to discover that his French wife Céleste, who was a young Resistance fighter in France, has been betrayed and murdered by Vichy collaborators, along with many of her companions, including even the priest who had married them. Powell goes berserk and wants vengeance. His French father-in-law tries to restrain him but cannot, and Powell charges off to Berne where he picks up a trail to Argentina to pursue the man responsible, a mysterious figure known as Marcel Jarnac (played in arch-sinister fashion by Luther Adler), who had been a close aide to Pétain. In trying to locate the elusive Jarnac, who is supposed to be dead but is not really dead, he traces Madame Jarnac. However, there is a hitch: she is not really Madame Jarnac at all but has been pressured into pretending to be Jarnac's 'widow', while having never even met Jarnac herself. Certainly that is an unusual plot twist for such stories. She is played by the French actress Micheline Cheirel, a fragile-looking creature with a vulnerable face who was married to John Loder just before his marriage to Hedy Lamarr. She stopped making films two years later, in 1947. In this film, Walter Slezak has a prominent role playing an unscrupulous and dishonest fixer for the Nazis, and Morris Carnovsky does one of his solid and reliable characters who in this case is a Nazi-hunter. Nina Vale is a rather over the top vamp. The story is corny and unconvincing in many ways. Powell charges around like a mad dog flashing a gun and letting everyone know he wants to find Jarnac and kill him. His behaviour is so outrageously stupid that one really has no sympathy for him at all. In any case, he scowls all the time, which becomes tiresome as his one expression. As someone tries to warn him: 'You cannot catch a trout by standing on the river bank and shouting at the top of your voice "I am a great fisherman!"' However, Powell does not get the message. He continues on his rampage, blundering, getting things wrong, insulting everyone, and generally behaving like a moron. I suppose he is meant to be some kind of anti-hero. The film is deeply disappointing.