📽️ “Cloak and Dagger,” dir. Fritz Lang (Warner Bros., 1946), is good as a thriller and as a war film. Unfortunately, it never develops its initial premise, the race to develop the atomic bomb.

Given that the U.S. was the only nuclear power in 1946, emphasizing the transferability of knowledge about weaponized applied nuclear physics would have been politically problematic anyway.

Fighting fascism, however, was a-okay. So were women serving as counterintelligence agents and partisans in this early Atomic Era film. Gary Cooper stars as an American physicist turned agent, who falls for a gun-toting Italian played by Lilli Palmer.