I have a sort of mission to track down and see all of Fritz Lang's American movies and welcomed the opportunity to watch this post Second World War Drama starring Gary Cooper. The film has its longueurs but on the whole tells a good story and contains at least one memorable set-piece by the great director.
Cooper's Hollywood roles tended to fall into two broad categories - shy bumbling whiter-than-white innocents ( see "Mr Deeds...", "Meet John Doe" or "Ball Of Fire") or calm, grace-under-pressure heroes like here. For me he does both equally well and while you can see that the man has aged as he enters the twilight of his career, he still carries off with aplomb the lead role. He also convinces in his relationship with his younger love interest, Lilli Palmer, who besides her good looks, displays maturity and sensitivity in her role as a behind-the-lines Resistance fighter.
The story has a topical theme too, the race to the Atomic bomb and Coop's character gets in a hefty diatribe early on about the perverse uses that science is being put to by men before he's drafted by an old comrade, now in the American secret service, to attempt to rescue a pair of fellow-scientists from enforced collaboration with the Nazis.
For me the story hangs together well, the acting as indicated, is good and the cinematography throughout is fine. The story does drag a bit in the middle as Cooper and Palmer start to get to know each other but is enlivened by the memorable "dirty-fight" between Cooper (and Palmer) with a pursuing enemy agent. No hay-maker punches here with enhanced sound effects, instead the fight encompasses face-gauging and finger bending before erstwhile peace-loving scientist Cooper dispatches his protagonist by strangulation. Lang then piles on the suspense with a scene reminiscent of "M" as a little boy's ball innocently bounces to where the fresh corpse lies, threatening discovery, only for Cooper to quickly improvise a cover-up. The fight scene (indeed some of the plot elements too) surely entered Hitchcock's thoughts when he produced his 1960's Cold War thriller "Torn Curtain".
Lang also doesn't shirk the brutalities of war, for instance the German nurse's brutal slaying of elderly, maternal scientist number one and the casual announcement later by a female Nazi agent that the second scientist's kidnapped daughter has also been cold-bloodedly slain.
On the whole a good, solid movie, not without faults but another worthy entry on my Lang-watch list.
