Really Surprised!

Nice effects though.

Excellent but underrated film

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

***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!

Inspired by the wartime exploits of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA, Fritz Lang's "Cloak and Dagger" (1946) tells the story of Alvah Jesper, a mild-mannered physics professor at a Midwestern university. Jesper is "hired" by the OSS to go to Europe at the tail end of WW2 and investigate Germany's development of the atomic bomb. (Hmmm...a mild-mannered, Midwestern university professor fighting Nazis during WW2...why does that seem so familiar?) Jesper, played by Gary Cooper, travels to Zurich and fascist Italy, winds up helping two fellow physicists who are being used by Germany, and becomes involved with a pretty Italian underground courier, Gina, feistily portrayed here by Lilli Palmer. (Curiously, although the film's opening credits say "And introducing Lilli Palmer," she had appeared in dozens of films before this one. What's up with that?) The picture features a fair amount of suspense and paranoia; indeed, not even nuns can be trusted in the web of espionage that Prof. Jesper finds himself caught in. Although it slows down a bit in its midsection, when Alvah and Gina are hiding out in various (not-so) safe houses, the viewer's brief patience is soon rewarded by the film's highlight: a brutal fight between Cooper and an eye-gouging OVRA agent (well portrayed by the perpetually slimy character actor Marc Lawrence); a tough, dirty and realistic battle to the death with only the sound of a street singer as accompaniment. I would imagine even Hitchcock applauding this bravura sequence. Expertly directed by Lang for maximum tension and featuring still another rousing score by the great Max Steiner, "Cloak and Dagger" is quite the winning entertainment indeed. Bottom line: If you want to see Cooper in what almost amounts to a proto-James Bond role--and he does acquit himself quite credibly--then this picture is for you.

Toward the end of World War II, the allied secret service receives a partial message indicating that the Germans are researching nuclear energy to build atomic bombs. In Midwestern University, the scientist Alvah Jesper (Gary Cooper) is called up by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to meet his former colleague Dr. Katerin Lodor (Helen Thimig) in Switzerland and bring her to North America. However, his mission fails and Dr. Lodor is killed by the Nazis but first she informs that Alvah's acquaintance Dr. Giovanni Polda (Vladimir Sokoloff) is working for the Nazis in Italy. Dr. Jesper travels to Italy and with the support of the Italian partisans leaded by Pinkie (Robert Alda) and Gina (Lilli Palmer), he has a meeting with Dr. Polda that is under the surveillance of the Gestapo. The scientist tells him that his daughter Maria had been abducted by the Gestapo and Alvah makes a deal with Dr. Polda, promising to release Maria first and bringing them to North America. While Pinkie travels to rescue Maria, Alvah stays with Gina and they fall in love for each other."Cloak and Dagger" is a suspenseful and full of action romance in times of war. The enjoyable story has good moments of tension but it is only a reasonable work of Fritz Lang. Gary Cooper's character seems to be a skilled and well-trained agent and not a scientist in many moments and Lili Palmer performs a strong female character in one of her first works. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "O Grande Segredo" ("The Great Secret")

The obvious criticism of this film is that Gary Cooper is just too much an American type to be engaged in espionage in Nazi occupied Europe. Who was Fritz Lang kidding here? It's the same problem the horribly miscast Henry Fonda had in War and Peace.Of course the reason Cooper was on such a mission was that he was an atomic physicist and the OSS borrowed him from the Manhattan Project for a little espionage. His mission was to check on an atomic scientist who was known to be working for the Nazis and is now in a Swiss Sanitarium. So off to neutral Switzerland Coop goes and he essentially bungles his mission, getting into the clutches of beautiful Nazi spy Marjorie Hoshelle. After that it's to Italy to grab Italian scientist Vladimir Sokoloff from the Nazis.The main criticism of Cloak and Dagger is that Cooper is way too American to be convincing. But that can somewhat be explained by the fact as a physicist he has some specialized knowledge that most agents couldn't exactly learn to converse intelligently with other physicists. That being said, I'm not quite sure why these scientists in particular were so critical to either the Allied or the Axis atomic projects.Cloak and Dagger is based on the real life exploits of Michael Burke while he was in the OSS. The film OSS done by Paramount and starring Alan Ladd is a far better film than this one.