Acossado!

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.

If it was post-war disillusionment that fuelled the booming film noir movement of the 1940s, then 'Cornered (1945)' might just be the most bitter, disillusioned noir of them all. Though I can't claim to be Edward Dmytryk's greatest fan, I enjoyed 'Murder, my Sweet (1944)' because of its evocative atmosphere and Dick Powell's cocky, swaggering Philip Marlowe. This film gets the atmosphere angle right, but is so utterly devoid of humour that there's little entertainment to be found through watching it. Powell, in his second and final film for the director, seems to be taking the role so seriously that he's almost bored with the material. His exceedingly grim performance has shades of the sleepy-eyed austerity that Robert Mitchum did so well – unfortunately, only Mitchum could ever pull it off correctly. Nevertheless, the shadowy photography of Harry J. Wild {who has many noirs to his credit, including 'The Woman on the Beach (1947),' 'They Won't Believe Me (1947)' and 'Macao (1952)} is predictably gorgeous and enigmatic, re-enforcing the murky themes at the film's heart.

When Canadian pilot Laurence Gerard (Powell) is released from captivity at the end of WWII, he is understandably grief-stricken to learn that his wife has been executed by Nazi conspirators. Though the man responsible, Marcel Jarnac, is presumed dead by authorities, Gerard suspects deception, and travels down to Beunos Aires to uncover the truth. What Gerard encounters is a party of dubious Frenchmen, whose continued loyalty to greed and corruption are keeping the Nazi spirit well-and-truly alive. Our hero's approach is not the most subtle of tactics – he never bothers to hide his true intentions, and so deliberately places his own life in constant jeopardy, rushing determinedly into danger without ever considering the possibility that he's walking straight into a trap. Is Jarnac's beautiful wife (Micheline Cheirel) really as innocent as she claims to be? Is the city's leading "tour guide" (Walter Slezak, in another terrific role) an impartial operator who can be trusted with secret information? Is the German collaborator Jarnac right before Gerard's very nose?

I've always found Dmytryk to be a very workman-like filmmaker, though there's little doubt that his 1940s noirs constitute the creative peak of his career. Clever stylistic touches, like the climactic bashing that slides out of focus in an adrenalin-charged delirium, complement the narrative nicely, and Wild's cinematography can do nothing but enhance the film's merits. However, the story itself dwells too long in gloomy territory, such that there's little of the usual entertainment or invigoration to be derived even from the richly-crafted atmosphere. Only in the blood-soaked climax is Dmytryk able to build up some degree of momentum, and Luther Adler's enigmatic cameo role is certainly memorable; he has a strong, deep voice that occasionally suggests that it is Satan himself speaking diabolically from the shadows. 'Cornered' is a worthwhile film noir, with solid craftsmanship throughout, but the unrepentantly dark tone makes for somewhat empty, unsatisfying viewing. Just like the story it depicts, I suppose. Once the adrenaline of war has worn off, there's nothing left but sadness, regret… and shadows where our loved ones once stood.

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.

If "The Maltese Falcon" represents the birth of what came to be known as Film Noir, and the war years were its childhood, then certainly this is its first bittersweet kiss. The writer, John Paxton, and the director Edward Dmytryk, seem charged up, electrified by the aftershocks of the just ended war. Characters are sharply drawn and unusually articulate, possessing a clarity of thought and emotional precision that's rare. "I'd rather have it quick than carefully" Dick Powell's Canadian flyer turned vengeful sleuth says at one point.

The Swiss watch plot is intricate and exhausting. When it's finally over you have the elated feeling that you've just completed a marathon and come in first. No one can be trusted. Everyone has a card up their sleeve and a gun in the top drawer. Just in case. Shadows, prying eyes, lonely dimly lit streets, whispered mistruths partially overheard but only half understood; that's what this film is about. Some have done it as well but none have done it better. The sense of claustrophobia, of walls closing in is overwhelming, particularly during one gripping scene set in an underground railway. Dmytryk whips you from one locale to the next, globe-hopping from London to Paris to Argentina, until you're dizzy. It's almost as if a world ravaged by war has become Powell's own personal trash heap, at the bottom of which may or may not be what he is looking for.

Powell is terse, tight-lipped and intractable, a quintessential Noir "hero", as the man desperately searching for the enigmatic Nazi collaborator responsible for his French wife's death. He shrugs off an onslaught of manipulative rhetoric and deception, trusting no one, cold-blooded revenge his only goal. But the real acting honors have to go to Walter Slezak, who is every bit as venal, calculating and cosmopolitan (not to mention plump) as Sidney Greenstreet was in "Falcon". A terrific performance. I also liked the way Luther Adler, on screen for less than five minutes but in a pivotal role, gets so much mileage out of a single raised eyebrow.

Post war disillusionment at its most raw and immediate. Virtually flawless.

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.