Cornered (RKO, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 24) at 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing even though not all that satisfying film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” feature. It was called Cornered, and it was made at RKO in 1945 as a follow-up to the surprise success of Murder, My Sweet (1944), perhaps the quintessential film noir and certainly the Raymond Chandler movie the way the 1941 The Maltese Falcon is the Dashiell Hammett movie and Double Indemnity (1944) the James M. Cain movie. RKO reunited the key creative personnel from Murder, My Sweet for Cornered: producer Adrian Scott, director Edward Dmytryk, writer John Paxton, cinematographer Harry J. Wild, and star Dick Powell. “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller described a particularly convoluted writing process for Cornered that probably accounts for the film’s weaknesses. Cornered began as a screen treatment ostensibly by Ben Hecht, though actually it was only from Hecht’s atelier. Like a number of more recent writers, including James Patterson and the late Tom Clancy, Hecht frequently farmed out his concepts to other, anonymous writers and collected big fees out of which he paid the actual writers a share and pocketed the rest himself. When Adrian Scott got the treatment for Cornered, he was immediately convinced it wasn’t by Hecht and assigned John Paxton, who’d written Murder, My Sweet and had made one key change to Raymond Chandler’s source novel Farewell, My Lovely that vastly improved the film (he changed the “good girl” from the unrelated Anne Riordan to Anne Grayle, stepdaughter of the villainess) to rewrite it and flesh it out into a full script.

Alas, William Dozier, head of RKO’s writers’ department, pulled Paxton off the film and reassigned it to John Wexley, who’d just worked on the Fritz Lang/Bertolt Brecht film Hangmen Also Die (1943) and had pulled a fast one to deny Brecht’s credit for writing the film. (Brecht wrote his script in German, Wexley translated it into English, and Wexley convinced the Screen Writers’ Guild to award him sole credit because he was staying in the U.S. and Brecht planned to return to Germany after the end of World War II. Lang got Brecht’s name on the film by giving him a co-credit with Lang himself for the basic story and its construction.) Political considerations played a part in the convoluted writing process of Cornered. Like Dick Powell, Paxton was a political conservative who apparently filled his script for Cornered with ponderous speeches full of Right-wing propaganda. Like Adrian Scott and Edward Dmytryk, Wexley was an actual Communist Party member, and he filled his script for Cornered with ponderous speeches full of Left-wing propaganda. Scott decided Wexley’s script was unusable, and he brought Paxton back onto the project – and Wexley struck again, hauling Scott and Dmytryk before an internal Communist tribunal and getting them banned from future participation in the Party. (Two years later, Scott and Dmytryk were part of the “Hollywood 10,” “unfriendly” witnesses before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, who were blacklisted and sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of Congress. Scott never again got a producer’s credit in Hollywood. Dmytryk decided to cooperate, seeing no reason to tank his career for a cause in which he no longer believed and for people who’d treated him so shabbily, and he went on to a major comeback in the 1950’s with films like The Caine Mutiny, Raintree County, and The Young Lions.)

The result was a convoluted story in which Dick Powell plays Laurence Gerard, a Canadian air force pilot in World War II who was briefly stationed in France and married to a woman named Celeste (whom we never see, not even in a flashback) for three weeks. Celeste was then killed, along with 50 other Resistance fighters, by a gang of French collabós led by Marcel Jarnac (Luther Adler, who had made only one film before – Lancer Spy from 1937 – and whose name was shrouded in secrecy; while the other actors were billed before the movie as usual for the time, Adler was only listed in a special credit at the end). Gerard wants to track down Jarnac and kill him for revenge. Delayed by the British authorities in obtaining a passport, he literally rows across the English Channel, deliberately sinking his boat and swimming the last leg. The search takes him first to Marseilles, then to Switzerland, and finally to Argentina, where he meets Jarnac’s purported widow Madeleine (Micheline Cheirel) as well as an obnoxious tour guide named Melchior Incza (Walter Slezak). Incza has clearly been briefed about Gerard, since when he introduces himself he already knows Gerard’s name and a good deal of his backstory. Incza suggests that Gerard attend a cocktail party hosted by Tomas Camargo (Steven Geray) and his wife (Ann Hunter, electrifying in a long black form-fitting, sequin-studded gown) where he promises a level of sexual and drug decadence the filmmakers obviously couldn’t do justice to in a Code-era movie. Señora Camargo blatantly makes a pass at Gerard, and when she tells him that this will be a relatively conservative (for her) party in which “only three husbands will be compromised,” Gerard fires back and asks, “Who are the other two?” That sounds very much like a Ben Hecht wisecrack no matter which writer came up with it.

While he was in Switzerland Gerard had come upon a burned-out house where Jarnac had formerly lived, and he recovered the front page of a dossier on Jarnac but the rest of the document was consumed in the fire. In Buenos Aires one of the guests at Mrs. Camargo’s party, attorney Manuel Santana (Morris Carnofsky), first has a couple of his goons beat Gerard up (Gerard loses consciousness in a scene so similar to the one in Murder, My Sweet both Charles and I chuckled at the similarity) and then, when Gerard comes to, tells him that he’s part of a secret Allied operation aimed at getting Jarnac and having him tried for war crimes, only Gerard’s personal revenge quest is just getting in their way. One of the baddies shoots Diego (Jack LaRue), ostensibly a hotel valet but actually part of the intrigues (though we’re not told how or which side he’s on) and tries to frame Gerard for the crime. Gerard is captured at an old bar called “Fortuna” he’s been lured to by the bad guys (I joked that the waiters there get together and sing Carmina Burana), and he finally meets Jarnac, whom he’d never seen before even though Jarnac ordered the murder of his wife. Gerard gets the guns away from the baddies and beats Jarnac literally to death, then presents Santana with a document that will prove Jarnac’s connection with the Camargos and expose the entire Nazi spy ring.

Cornered is a tricky, convoluted movie in which the various intrigues seem at war with each other for prominence, and the film seems way too contrived, too consciously designed as a showpiece for “The New Dick Powell.” James Agee reviewed it for The Nation when it was new and liked it considerably better than I did: “Dick Powell, with a Bogart haircut [in fact Powell’s hair is noticeably shorter and more buzz-cut in the final scene than in the rest of the movie], sometimes works a bit too conspicuously at being The New Dick Powell (‘rougher, tougher, and more terrific,’ as the billboards not very helpfully insist). But on the whole, perhaps because he still looks less official, less highly paid to look small-bracket, and less superhuman and bound-to-win-out, I think he is even better, just now, for this sort of role, than the Founder himself.” Actually, despite the extent to which the film was tailor-made for Dick Powell 2.0, it did occur to me that it might have been better with John Garfield in the lead. With his knack for playing toughness and vulnerability at the same time, Garfield could have made Gerard’s revenge quest more authentic and believable, whereas Powell approaches the role so stoically one agrees with the other character who asks him why the death of a woman he was married to for just three weeks matters so much to him.

As a follow-up to Murder, My Sweet, in which Powell played a tough but vulnerable character far richer and more complicated than Laurence Gerard, Cornered is a disappointment. As a showcase for Dick Powell 2.0, it works pretty well even though all too much of it takes place during daytime and only the final scene has the true look of film noir. Charles chuckled at the street in Buenos Aires, which was actually RKO’s standard urban street set with the usual English-language signs replaced with Spanish ones. There’s also a scene in a park that was equally obviously an RKO standing set: the one that so memorably served as New York’s Central Park in Val Lewton’s first production, Cat People (1942). Cornered also has too many resemblances to The Maltese Falcon for its own good, from the fake “dossier” Gerard makes up about Jarnac (the cover page is the real one but the rest is just blank pieces of paper Gerard singes the edges of to make it look authentic) and the attempts to turn Walter Slezak’s character into a fusion of the Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre characters from Falcon, to Madeleine Jarnac’s admission (especially when it turns out she isn’t really Jarnac’s widow but was hired by the good guys to pose as such in order to lure him out of hiding) that she’s been lying all along that sounds an awful lot like Mary Astor’s confession to Bogart that “I’ve been a bad woman, worse than you could know.” But overall, Cornered is a pretty good movie even though it’s hardly in the top flight of noirs the way Murder, My Sweet is.