Robert J. Maxwell Fritz Lang handles the direction competently and the story is as fascinating as it is confusing. Cooper is a mild-mannered physicist swept up by the OSS and sent to Switzerland to interview a Nazi refugee and find out how far the Nazis and Italians (they're in cahoots) have gotten on the atom bomb. His physicist colleague is a sweet and exhausted old lady, eager to cooperate, but she's kidnapped from the hospital because the Gestapo know what's going on.Thereafter, the intrigue builds. The narrative becomes murky, like my chili bean soup. But that problem can be overcome by paying attention. The real problem is with some of the performances. I hate to say it, because it sounds incredible, but Gary Cooper overacts. His eyebrows go up and down like twin elevators. And -- well, I'll give one scene as an example.On his first day in Switzerland, Cooper finds himself waiting in the hotel bar for a phone call and he begins schmoozing with an attractive fellow American, Marjorie Hoshelle. He discovers later that she's working for the Gestapo. With no adumbration he shows up at her apartment and displays fake evidence that she's been framed into looking like an American spy. No explanation is provided of how all this phony evidence was fabricated.But that's a weakness in the writing, not the performance. Upon finding out that her amiable American cover has been blown, Hoshelle turns into a virtual caricature of a Nazi. She stands with her feet apart, her hands on her hips, her head thrown back, and with a sneer she heaps her anger and contempt on him. It's too bad she lacks a German accent. It would have sounded so good if she'd said, "In dzah end, it is VEE who vill vin dhiz vor!" Lang had some good noirs coming up, but he was asleep at the switch in scenes like this.Still, his staging and lighting are fine. That includes the fist fight which, at one point, Cooper seems in danger of losing. He has to wallop the guy over the head with a mounted stag head, and his opponent is much older and shorter than Cooper. Usually it's the bad guy who is the first to pick up the furniture or a poker or a stuffed head in a fight. But then these Gestapo types are like wild beasts.His elderly opponent is a demon of energy. And when his matronly wife twigs to what's going on, she grabs up a pistol, rushes into the room of the kidnapped old lady who's a righteous physicist, and shoots her four times before exiting through the window. Caught by the OSS agents outside, the old guy's wife snarls, kicks, scratches, and curses like a grizzly bear. A later fight is even more brutal. It must be said that Cooper is suave and canny, physically adept, and handy with a .45 for a simple college professor who's had no training in espionage and who probably hasn't held anything but a beebee gun since childhood.There's another hole in the plot. Cooper lands on the Italian coast with a buddy who calls him "Al". The buddy is played by Robert Alda, who speak passable Italian. But we've never been properly introduced. In fact, we have no idea who he is. We must figure out his part in the story with no help from the script. Then Lili Palmer appears. She needs no introduction. What a beauty. Cooper seeks out another possible Italian collaborator -- Vladimir Nikolayevich Sokoloff, who was born in Moscow and followed the same path as Vladimir Nabokov in his retreat from Naziism: Russia to Berlin to Paris to America. Here, he speaks Italian, German, and English -- all with a Russian accent. But what the hell. To Hollywood he was a "foreigner". The scenes of the landing, by the way, are studio-bound but convincing -- the rocky shore line, the rain storm, the wavelets lapping at the tiny strand. It's after the landing that we see more of the dagger as well as the cloak.The romance that develops inevitably between Cooper and Palmer is actually well done. Usually these amours only interfere with the plot, drummed up to please part of the audience. But this one is handled well by both actors. Palmer is at first brusque but it's not until later that she pathetically reveals the extent to which she's tortured herself for having slept with "fat Gestapo pigs". It's a strangely moving scene.I won't give away the ending but she stands, glowing with hope for the future, and waving at the departing Bristol Blenheim that is whisking some passengers off to safety.

Alex da Silva Gary Cooper (Professor Jesper) is a nuclear scientist who is sent on an espionage assignment into Switzerland to discover and report back what progress the Nazis have made in developing an atomic bomb. It's World War II and the race is on to blow each other up. He is told that respected scientist Helen Thimig (Katarin Lodor) is to be his point of contact but his assignment turns into a rescue mission on meeting her. When this fails, he switches his focus to Italy where he links up with the Italian Underground movement in order to rescue Vladimir Sokoloff (Polda), another super-brain scientist.The film reminded me of a James Bond style spy story. The cast are all OK and there are plenty of sequences that propel the plot forwards, although the film loses it's pace a bit with the romantic section between Cooper and Resistance fighter Lilli Palmer (Gina), which slows things down for about 20 minutes. As regards the plot, I'm not sure it makes sense. Jesper is sent to find out information and report back, but he ends up in the front-line as a spy with a gun who has to fight and defend himself and is involved in a kidnapping plot. Totally unreal but it really doesn't matter. It's an enjoyable film with a collection of memorable sequences, eg, the French Resistance at the beginning, the scene when Cooper confronts undercover Gestapo agent Marjorie Hoshelle (Ann Dawson), the Italian Resistance and the episode in the truck, and the fight scene between Cooper and Marc Lawrence (Luigi).

sol ***SPOILERS*** Espionage movie that takes place in the closing months of WWII in Europe that has everyone's idea of the all-Amerian cowboy Gary Cooper play top nuclear physicist, in the class of a Prof.Robert J. Oppenheimer, Midwestern University Prof. Alvah Jesper. Prof. Jesper is recruited into the the super secret US spy agency the OSS by his good friend from collage Col Walsh, James Falvin, to find out just were the Nazis are in their experiments in nuclear fission.Given cover with new name and profession as a jewelry salesman Jesper is sent to Zürich Switzerland to get in contact with his mentor, who thought he everything about nuclear psychics, Dr. Katerin Lodor, Helen Thimic. Dr. Lodor has escaped from Nazi Germany through the dangerous Swiss Alps and is now recuperating from a bad case of pneumonia in a Zürich hospital.Lodor who was the top man, or in her case woman, in the Nazi nuclear project has now second thoughts of helping the allies in that the Nazis have threatened to shoot 10 fellow anti-Fachist Hungarians every day she stays in exile. This all is alleviated for Dr. Lodor by her getting kidnapped and murdered by the Nazi, or their agents, before she can help the allies with her knowledge of nuclear psychics. Just when the movie starts to lag it's then decided by Jesper's bosses in the OSS for his to be smuggled in Fascist controlled Italy to help get out the Italian top nuclear physicist a Dr. Giovanni Polda, Vladimir Sokolff, who despite working for the Mussolini regime in public hates its guts with a white-hot passion in private.Getting in contact with a number of anti-Fascist Italian partisans that includes the gun toting and dead eyed Gina, Lili Palmer, and her though as nails comrade in arms Pinkie, Robert Alda, Jesper plans to sneak Dr. Polda out of the country to the safety of the UK but the Doc isn't all that interested to leave. It's not that the wimpy and scared of his shadow Dr. Polda likes the Nazis and Italian Fascist's but in that their holding his daughter Marie hostage and would kill her if he ever checked out of Italy!***SPOILERS*** Gary Cooper as Prof. Jester who's nothing but as dull as dishwater for the first half of the movie comes alive in slugging it out with the hated Nazis with them, who outnumbered him as his fellow Nazi fighters by as much as 50 to 1, ending up getting the worst of it! Jesper not only gets Dr. Polda out of the country with an RAF passenger plane but also gets the girl Gina, who wanted to stay in Italy and fight the Nazi-Fascist's, to also leave the country along with him. In the end it's we, the good guys, not the Nazis who got the bomb and also got a chance to use it. Not on Nazi Germany who had since surrendered to the allies but its ally Japan thus putting an end to the Second World War. P.S Even though the movie "Cloke & Dagger" was originally meant, by its director Fritz Lange, to be a very anti-nuclear and anti-war arms movie the ending was changed by the time it was released in September 1946. By then the US was engaged in the Cold War with it's former major WWII ally the Soviet Union and being against the production and use of nuclear weapons, or as their now called WMD, was considered to be very unpatriotic at that time. That with the US-not USSR-being the only country on earth who had an was, like in the case of nuking Japan, more then willing to use them!

JD Ralston If you cut this movie in half it would be tolerable. Gary Pooper is awkward and painful to watch. The middle section of the movie when Cooper and Palmer are hiding out in France has a slight "Casablanca" feel. It's the only part of the movie that didn't make me want to smack someone. Palmer is the poor man's Bergman and I won't even mention that Pooper guy in the same sentence with Bogart. Yuck what a waste of time. Fritz Lang directed this tripe? This is the same guy who gave us M and Metropolis? It was made by United States Pictures and the best I can figure is that it was a propaganda attempt. Cooper was just awful but the story and writing didn't help any of the other actors either. The writing is so bad it's embarrassing. If this was Coopers only movie I would link him with Dan Duryea as the bottom of the barrel in black and white pictures. I watched this because I thought it was a noir picture. It is not. I would call it film no. As in no don't watch it.