Cornered is a hard-edged, intense 1940s film noir, with the director Edward Dmytryk exercising the kind of caustic filmmaking skills that were his trademark.
Dick Powell plays a demobbed Canadian air force pilot on the point of breakdown. He is attempting to cross the Channel; his French wife (of a 20-day marriage) has been murdered at the direction of a corrupt Vichy collaborationist, leaving him with one simple, vengeful aim in life. Powell's character, initially filthy and unshaven as he makes his way across a war-ravaged countryside, is shown as a man who has nothing to lose, living only for revenge. His search ends in Buenos Aires. The film is remarkably violent for its day; one man with his face shot away, another bloodily beaten to death with bare fists.
Shot (by Harry J. Wild) in the moody black and white that is the hallmark of the genre, the film is studded with several on-the-nail character performances from the army of actors that Hollywood could call upon in this period (notably the heavyweight, constantly perspiring Walter Slezak, excellent as a serviceable fixer playing both ends against the middle), making up for the low-wattage female players. But the film belongs to its central actor. Dick Powell (who Raymond Chandler named the best of the screen incarnations of his private eye Philip Marlowe), was wont to give a visceral intensity to his straight parts (perhaps to keep at bay memories that audiences would have of his lightweight turns in such Hollywood musicals of the 1930s as Gold Diggers of 1933), and as he gets closer and closer to his vicious quarry, makes no attempt at likeability, or attempts any grabs for audience sympathy. And it's this intensity (in an era when audiences customarily demanded such qualities from the antiheroes of thrillers) that makes the film seem strikingly contemporary. Of its day, though, is the leftist, anti-fascist stance injected by the personnel behind the camera. The damn-the-consequences manhunt is a current staple of the Hollywood thriller, but in 1945, Edward Dmytryk gave the theme one of its most single-minded workouts.
A wartime noir from noted director Edward Dmytryk. In Cornered, Dick Powell stars as demobbed Canadian pilot Laurence Gerard who returns to France to find out who ordered the killing of a group of Resistance fighters - including his new bride.
He identifies Vichy collaborator Marcel Jarnac and follows the trail to Argentina, where it is apparent that Nazism is alive and well...
