Cloak Without Dagger

A fairly run of the mill early fifties British spy thriller with some familiar faces along the way. Leslie Dwyer does his usual good job as a private investigator but the film is really enlivened by Mary Mackenzie as the female lead. She isn't an actress I'm familiar with and it seems hers was a career confined to small parts before she died in a car crash aged only 44. She's not obvious leading lady material but she's very good in this and comes over well. The best description I can come up with to describe her is that she has a passing resemblance to Flora Robson but with sex appeal. Nothing groundbreaking about the film itself but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

CLOAK WITHOUT DAGGER is a cheapie put out by Balblair Productions, who released precisely three films during their short-lived career in the film business: this, THE BLACK RIDER, and STOCK CAR. All of them were written by prolific screenwriter A. R. Rawlinson and STOCK CAR is probably the best of the rather nondescript bunch, a gangster story set in and around a garage. CLOAK WITHOUT DAGGER is more undistinguished, a film in which the villains are spies working for their own purposes.

It starts off well with some top intrigue inside a nondescript hotel and goes downhill from there. Leslie Dwyer is a likable enough familiar face in the British B-film genre but he's miscast as a detective here. Mary Mackenzie is much better as the plucky heroine who literally stumbles over a corpse at one point. There are welcome roles for Allan Cuthbertson, Bill Nagy, and Frank Thornton, but the whole thing feels rather lifeless and drawn out, a far cry from the best of the spy thriller genre. Perhaps the budget just wasn't up to the job.

In places this resembles a sixties rather than a fifties spy movie, with it's sinister Chinese femme fatale and plot involving nuclear weapons, and boasts the promotion of the rather stern-looking Mary Mackenzie (who usually played unglamorous character parts and actually declares at one point that "I could never be described as lush!") to the sharp-witted, sharp-featured and sharp-suited heroine who does most of the sleuthing.

"Operation Conspiracy" is a clumsily written spy story. It begins in London during a fashion show. A runway model faints and soon after dies. A reporter who used to be a military spy during WWII catches the girl as she falls and she's the main character in this film.

Later, the reporter lady meets one of the staff at the hotel and he happens to be a long lost love. However, now he's a waiter and says he has no interest in this old past life.

What follows is a clumsy flashback sequence where she spots a wanted man without much information about him and only seconds after she hears about him. She just KNOWS it's him. In other words, she had knowledge NO ONE could have had unless they were reading a script.

After the flashback, the woman finds a dead man in the hotel. When she tells her old friend, he minimizes it...like she's some hysterical woman even though he knows she used to be a military police operative. It's obvious that either this is really badly written, he's working under cover OR he's a part of whatever nonsense is happening. She doesn't seem to think much of this and just goes to bed instead of to the police.

What follows is a spy yarn which OFTEN has plot holes and is very poorly written in places...such as when she passes out for no apparent reason. People do NOT do this...it only happens in films. She also hires a guy to work as a private detective for her even though she has no proof of who he is! And, by this point I was bored because of the indifferent writing...and I assume you'll likely feel the same.

Felix (Philip Friend) and Kyra (Mary Mackenzie) were an item during the war. One night some years later they bump into each other.

Kyra is now a fashion reporter. Felix is a waiter but he might be into something more. On the trail of an exotic enemy agent which Kyra is all for. Only she finds a dead body in a hotel which then promptly disappears.

She enlists the help of hotel detective Fred (Leslie Dywer) who used to be a cop. He ends up being suspicious of Felix instead.

Cloak Without Dagger is a quota quickie. It is cheaply made with decent production values but a hackneyed and silly plot.

The best performances are from Dwyer and Mackenzie.