Cloak and Dagger
Directed by Fritz Lang 106 mins (1946)
Gary Cooper – Prof. Alvah Jesper
In this Fritz Lang’s compelling World War II espionage thriller, Gary Cooper stars as Alvah Jasper, a shy and retiring physics professor at a midwestern university. When government agents press Jasper into joining them in an effort to curtail the Nazis’ efforts to attain atomic secrets, his life takes a dramatic turn.
Also starring Robert Alda, Lilli Palmer, Vladimir Sokoloff and J. Edward Bromberg
During one scene while Gary Cooper is walking, there is a shot of his ankle, shoe and pant leg and what appears to be a "leg brace". Cooper limped due to a car accident as a younger man. There is no indication in the film that the prosthetic was planned or a deliberate and part of the character.
MAria’s notes
This film was made in 1946 cast my father very much against type. his role as a nuclear scientist names Alvah Jasper was what the Austrian director Fritz Lang wanted to do, and he always said he based the character Jasper on our famous atomic scientist J. R. Oppenheimier.
I remember going out with my parents to visit Cal Tech where the studio had arranged for him to get a “little coaching” from the scientific community there. To get into the skin of an atomic scientist was not a role my father did with ease. He was coached in order to learn to speak with ease, some of the technical dialogue and acquire some information about the ‘splitting of atoms”!! He was in awe as we stood in the back of the classroom/laboratory and watched the professor fill a huge blackboard with numbers, diagrams, equations: He wrote so fast the images seemed to explode all over the board, like a meadow of Paul Klee creatures come to life. In an unusual way this was a challenging film for my father and he was nervous about delivering his scientific dialogue with enough conviction and knowledge. As for the physical ‘action” there are rough fights in this film and he did not use a double in spite of was suffering from an old hip and back injury.
The “message” of the movie about the dangers of Atomic Energy and its misuse in the wrong hands, created controversy. In a speech that Jasper gives he passionately says— “ Peace? There is no peace. It’s year ONE of the AtomicAge and God have mercy on us all——if we think we can wage other wars without destroying ourselves etc…”. It got thrown out by the studio and they insisted Jasper/Cooper deliver a bland, innocuous speech, which for me undermined some of the guts of the story.
Poppa loved working with Lily Palmer in this, her first American film. She became a close family friend as well a his co-star, and he felt was an extremely fine actress. This is a very different Gary Cooper film, but he always wanted to try out different personas …another facet of his versatile acting talents.
Maria Cooper Janis