Pris au piège

A lot of the Hayes code seems destined for the trash heap in this film. We see women who are obviously willing to sleep with our protagonist. There's blood. There are bodies, right out in the open. Burned up or riddled with bullet holes, there they are. One of our characters gets slugged in the mouth and we see a bloody drizzle escaping his lips.

Yes, the Hayes code took a beating with this one.

There are dark, sinister looks, from dark sinister people. Gerard (Powell) is surrounded by murderous people and we don't know who is for him or against him. At least not until the end of the film.

This one film is proof positive that the innocence of America is long gone. No one is smiling. No one is truly happy. Everyone is on edge because, even though the war is over, our cast is headed for a long torturous road to normalcy. We are all hoping they make it.

During the war, Gerard (Powell) is returned to friendly territory were he recovers from his wounds. While in hospital, he receives a letter from his wife's father, telling him that his wife is dead. Gerard knows something isn't right and that "Dad" isn't telling the whole story.

He applies for a visa and is told a background check (his) will take a month. He returns to France illegally, to get answers. And thus the fun begins.

This is excellent film noir told from the perspective of writers, a director, and producer who have been affected by real war.

It shows.

I really enjoyed this war-set film noir with avenging angel Dick Powell continent-hopping to track down the shadowy Nazi commander who ordered the killing of his young wife.

The plot is a bit labyrinthine and probably peopled with too many characters but director Dymytrk keeps up the tension throughout and genuflects regularly in the direction of film noir with shadowy shots a-plenty, a mysterious woman who may or not be on Powell's side as well as Powell's turn himself as a sort of amateur private eye, getting deeper and deeper out of his depth as he closes in, he thinks, on his prey.

Powell doesn't do hangdog like Bogart or style like Grant, but he's deadpan and feisty by turns and does a reasonable job carrying the film from chapter to chapter. I also liked Walter Slezak as a sort of younger version of Sydney Greenstreet, trying to play both ends against each other but coming a cropper by the end as two quite grisly murders are enacted for us.

I liked the early location shots in war torn Europe and was otherwise satisfied too, with director Dymytrk doing a good job keeping the plates all spinning and who intelligently treats this terse thriller with a bit more attention to detail than other more slapdash filmmakers.

I'll watch almost every noir film I can as it's probably my favourite movie type and consider this effort, if occasionally a touch on the dry side, nevertheless a fine example of this particular genre.

Dick Powell was one of those classic Hollywood actors who was so laid back, so cool, so quick with the one-liner that he made most other actors seem positively dull. Even in the tightest of corners, he could always manage a suitable quip – and in this outing (as Laurence Gerard), he has his fair share...

He's ably supported by Walter Slezak (as Melcior Incza – what a name!) who once again plays a double-dealing con artist always looking for the main chance – in this case, trying to make a few more dishonest bucks helping – or is he hindering? -- Gerard track down the dirty traitor Marcel Jarnac (a short but fine performance from Luther Adler) who is responsible for Gerard's wife's death in France towards the end of World War II.

So, the quest in on. Along the way, Gerard travels from London, to France, to Switzerland and finally to Argentina where he finally begins his search in earnest. From that point until the end, the twists and turns in the plot remind me of the confusion that permeated The Big Sleep (1946). Cornered, however, does arrive at a satisfactory conclusion, unlike the Bogart classic which still puzzles viewers today (I've read that even Bogart remained unclear about the plot of The Big Sleep also).

However, back to this one...

Overall, I liked this film for its great use of darkness, shadows, excellent mise-en-scene, as befitting film-noir, and the sharp dialog; I thought, however, the pacing of the story was a bit slow at times and that some of the cuts were often very jerky, thus resulting in uneven narrative transitions. And the really big omission is the absence of an effective femme fatale. The rest of the production was okay and, for 1945, was equal to other B-movies of the genre.

Dick Powell went on to do more film noir (Johnny O'Clock, Pitfall, Rogues' Regiment and others) until 1954 when he opted for the emerging TV juggernaut. So, if you've missed this one up till now, it's worth the 102 minutes out of your life just to listen to Dick Powell and watch him grimace while he cracks sardonic jokes...

Buenos Aires enjoyed a vogue (so far as the movies were concerned) in the mid-1940s, providing the locale for Notorious, Gilda and Edward Dmytryk's Cornered. In all three, it serves as a sort of terminal moraine for Nazi refugees from the shambles of the Axis powers.

Dick Powell continues his transformation from lip-glossed song-and-dance man for Busby Berkeley into a five-o'clock-shadowed tough guy, a makeover he had begun the previous year as Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (also by Dmytryk). Here he's a Canadian Royal Air Force veteran who ends up in Argentina, via France and Switzerland, on a mission to avenge the murder of his war-bride wife. He enters a whirl of black-tie affairs in cavernous mansions (those Nazis knew how to party) and a nest of duplicity surrounding the mysterious, and presumably dead, war-criminal-in-chief, known as Jarnac -- the object of his deadly hunt. An at-first bewildering cast of sinister operatives gradually sorts itself out into villains (Walter Slezak the most memorable of them) and members of an anti-Fascist group; Powell, the while, skulks along the moonlit streets of the city in pursuit of Jarnac's "widow."

Dmytryk displays his pioneering flair for noir devices, keeping the atmospherics and tension high. He's let down a bit by the murkiness of the plotting, where the political theme emerges and disappears, leaving abstract stretches of suspense that might as easily have taken place in Boston or Bombay. And it's hard to buy into the convention that, in rooms blazing with gunfire, the red-blooded American will always prevail by means of a manly sock to the jaw. Somewhat dated by its wartime politics and its roots in the international-intrigue genre, Cornered remains a solid piece of work by both Dmytryk and Powell.

I really enjoyed this film, but i thought that it could've been edited tighter. The run time was a little too long, and a tighter edit would've helped the film greatly. It also would've been nice to have a bigger female star for the main female character. Hedy Lamarr would've been my first choice. But overall, i was very impressed with the film and thought that Dick Powell's performance was strong. He showed a greater range of emotions than i've seen in other Powell films.