“This is the new Dick Powell,” the trailer insists. “Rougher. Tougher than in Murder, My Sweet.” Cornered is indeed the “new Dick Powell”. Audiences in the late 1930s and early 1940s knew him best as a crooner. But 1944’s Murder, My Sweet changed all that, when Powell became the first screen iteration of Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s dog-eared, quippy detective. In an adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, Powell delivered Chandler’s dialogue with great style – “She was a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud. I gave her a drink. She was a gal who’d take a drink, if she had to knock you down to get the bottle.”
Chandler himself was impressed. So was the back office at RKO. In an anticipation of the “if you like that, you’ll like this” algorithm, they put Powell into another movie with Edward Dmytryk, who’d directed Murder, My Sweet, got an uncredited Ben Hecht in to wiseguy up the dialogue and cast their re-invigorated star as a Canadian chasing across Europe, and eventually to Buenos Aires, on the trail of Marcel Jarnac, the Nazi collaborator who killed his French wife.
Jarnac is supposedly dead, but Laurence Gerard (Powell) isn’t buying that story. He believes there is a network of former Nazis spiriting the guilty out of Europe and off into comfortable obscurity in Argentina.
Like Casablanca, this is a film full of unreliable Europeans with questionable loyalties. Like Casablanca, there’s a florid fat man at the centre of things. Melchior Incza (Walter Slezak) is like a character out of Graham Greene as portrayed by Sydney Greenstreet and reeks of dubious connections – he namedrops Göring at one point, talking of the fabulous parties Göring (another fat man) used to throw.
But is Mme Madeleine Jarnac (Micheline Cheirel), the missing man’s wife/widow, in on the scam? Or is she an innocent bystander who just happens to be in Argentina, where all the rich Europeans who sat out the war are now rubbing shoulders with collaborators and Nazis on the run?
Also questionable in the extreme is another potential wrong’un, Señora Camargo (Ann Hunter), a wealthy socialite around whom the expats orbit.
What these two women wear is part of the story. Mme Jarnac is impeccably tailored throughout, her spiffy costumes a “fuck you” to the Europeans on the other side of the ocean, who sacrificed a lot while their “betters” were avoiding the war. Señora Camargo, on the other hand, dresses like her clothes are about to fall off. Make of that what you will.
Obviously aping Philip Marlowe, Powell spits out his snappy dialogue, while around him noirish strings shimmer and brass sections blare. This is a film with great style, thanks to Dmytryk’s pacy direction and the slanting shadows and pools of light by DP Harry Wild (who had also worked on Murder, My Sweet, and would later light Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, work in another register entirely).
It’s a noticeably better film in its opening two thirds. The energy drops a touch as improbabilities mount and the plot starts to spin its wheels, only for things to pick up again in the dash for the finish, when all the noir settings are turned up to the max.
The character of Gerard, driven by revenge, isn’t entirely wholesome and that suits Powell, who is still obviously keen to shake off his old, nice image. Nastiness simmers below the surface in this movie, which has a keen eye for the political realities of the time – who was talking about Nazis networks to South America in 1945? And there’s even a warning to the future – as one Nazi collaborator speaking, appropriately, from the shadows puts it: wherever “men cannot earn the money to feed their children, there you will find us at work…” Talk about prescient.
Cornered (as part of Film Noir Classic Collection: Volume 5) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
