This film, made immediately after the War, is about fleeing Nazis and Vichy collaborators. They are succinctly described in the dialogue by someone who says of them: 'They don't consider themselves to be defeated.' And that was true of those who escaped. Indeed, the post-War phase of Nazism could be described as the metastasis of Nazism. Deprived of their original host body, Germany, which had finally died as a result of their having infected it, they spread throughout the larger body of the world, like carcinoma cells, lodging wherever they could, and proliferating when possible, aided by all their stolen gold which had been looted from all the capitals of Europe. (A lot of it was smuggled out of Germany in tanks of hazardous chemicals.) Their primary destinations were Switzerland, Sweden, Chile, and Argentina. Switzerland and Argentina are the ones featured in this story, most of which takes place in Buenos Aires (though it is entirely a studio set where everyone speaks English and no one seems to know any Spanish!) The film was directed by Ed Dmytryk, a passionate Nazi-hater who was later black-listed by Hollywood for his left wing sympathies. Because of his long-standing political persuasion, he was that much more alert to metastastic Nazism than most people of the time, who were simply glad for the War to be over and who naively imagined than 'over' meant 'over'. There are a few purple passages in the script which sound as if they were lifted from a political pamphlet. The lead character is played by Dick Powell, a solemn-jowled actor who does not show any humour or even politeness. He plays a demobbed Lieutenant Colonel of the Canadian Air Force who has come out of imprisonment and hospital, slightly dazed and shell-shocked, to discover that his French wife Céleste, who was a young Resistance fighter in France, has been betrayed and murdered by Vichy collaborators, along with many of her companions, including even the priest who had married them. Powell goes berserk and wants vengeance. His French father-in-law tries to restrain him but cannot, and Powell charges off to Berne where he picks up a trail to Argentina to pursue the man responsible, a mysterious figure known as Marcel Jarnac (played in arch-sinister fashion by Luther Adler), who had been a close aide to Pétain. In trying to locate the elusive Jarnac, who is supposed to be dead but is not really dead, he traces Madame Jarnac. However, there is a hitch: she is not really Madame Jarnac at all but has been pressured into pretending to be Jarnac's 'widow', while having never even met Jarnac herself. Certainly that is an unusual plot twist for such stories. She is played by the French actress Micheline Cheirel, a fragile-looking creature with a vulnerable face who was married to John Loder just before his marriage to Hedy Lamarr. She stopped making films two years later, in 1947. In this film, Walter Slezak has a prominent role playing an unscrupulous and dishonest fixer for the Nazis, and Morris Carnovsky does one of his solid and reliable characters who in this case is a Nazi-hunter. Nina Vale is a rather over the top vamp. The story is corny and unconvincing in many ways. Powell charges around like a mad dog flashing a gun and letting everyone know he wants to find Jarnac and kill him. His behaviour is so outrageously stupid that one really has no sympathy for him at all. In any case, he scowls all the time, which becomes tiresome as his one expression. As someone tries to warn him: 'You cannot catch a trout by standing on the river bank and shouting at the top of your voice "I am a great fisherman!"' However, Powell does not get the message. He continues on his rampage, blundering, getting things wrong, insulting everyone, and generally behaving like a moron. I suppose he is meant to be some kind of anti-hero. The film is deeply disappointing.
Review of Cornered
