CORNERED (1945)

In France during World War II, Canadian pilot Laurence Gerard (Dick Powell, pictured) is married for twenty days to a young French girl. Back with the RCAF, he is captured, spends the rest of the war as a POW, and when he's released, he discovers his wife, a member of the resistance, is dead, betrayed (along with many others in her village) by a shadowy figure named Jarnac. Gerard is determined to get revenge against Jarnac, but finds him difficult to track down—no one even seems to know what he looks like. Eventually Gerard follow a nebulous trail to Buenos Aries where he finds Jarnac's wife who assumes her husband is dead but, oddly, doesn’t even know what he looked like—it was an arranged marriage of convenience for both her (the daughter of a collaborationist, she needed to get out of France) and him (he needed her to tell people that he was dead). Gerard gets involved with a group including Incza, a sleazy tourist guide who knows something about Jarnac; a lawyer named Santana who may be a fascist and warns him against getting to close to Mme. Jarnac; Deigo, a bartender at a party who seems to be tailing Gerard; and a handful of others whose sympathies are unclear. As it happens, some of these folks are members of an anti-fascist group who are hunting down fallen Nazis who have landed in Buenos Aries, and they are afraid that the hot-headed Gerard will spoil their plans.

This noir-style thriller is reasonably tense up until the 60 minute mark when the plot and character convolutions grow difficult to follow, though I do appreciate the attempt to keep the ambiguity about character motives going as long as possible. Still, it's worth watching mostly for Dick Powell's effective performance as a single-minded guy who seems to be barely keeping his stoic surface intact over his rage-filled desire for revenge. Powell switched from overgrown musical juvenile to noir tough guy in a highly acclaimed performance in MURDER MY SWEET the year before this, and he's as good if not better here. Good support comes from Morris Carnovsky, Steven Geray, Jack La Rue, and Micheline Cheirel. I'm not sure why we are kept from seeing Jarnac for so long—without giving a direct spoiler, I can say that the mystery over his identity is not justified, so don't expect a big gasp of surprise when he is finally revealed. As it is, the point of having the character show up at all seems to be to let him be a warning voice about how hard it is to eradicate fascism (see current U.S. politics for a more recent example). You can read this movie as anti-fascism propaganda but it's best enjoyed as a fairly tense noir-ish thriller. [TCM]