Maybe a little tongue will take your mind off your skinny little dead wife.
Cornered (1945), if I’m to believe the release date, is a slightly prescient story concerning the human debris of war. It follows the vengeance of a Canadian, RAF Lt. Laurence Gerard, who, shot down during the war, met and married a member of the French Resistance, made it back to England, fought some more, and survives to the war’s end.
His wife does not. All he received was a notice of her death and a load of PTSD, a condition scarcely recognized during World War II, which is one reason for my assessment of prescience.
The story opens with him being demobbed[1] and making his way to France. Right off the bat we get tastes of his drive & style: when told it’ll take a month to get his visa approved to go to France, he finds his own way across Channel, doing the last couple of miles in a rowboat – which he then sinks. Long sought Peace may be upon the land, but this is a man still in fighting mode.
He rapidly finds his father-in-law, and eventually it comes out: his wife, and a number of other members of the Resistance, were taken to a cave, lined up, and shot.
Leaving the question: who did it?
Eventually, he’s in South America, which in reality also turned out to be a haven of runaway Nazis and collaborators, and gives me more reason for the assessment of prescient. Gerard is chasing a ghost: a man listed as dead, but with no other record. His wife is now in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Gerard, driven by his demons, gives chase.
The story has several satisfying twists, an exotic flavoring of those who savagely dance on the fringes of civilization, seeking the naked ugliness of raw political power over those they choose to despise. Against this backdrop, Gerard’s visceral pain and anger is a streak of dark green against the gangrenous putrefaction of the Nazis.
For all that, I thought the performance of the lead was a trifle one note, his PTSD could have played a bigger part in the story, and the antagonists could have used more development. But this story is neither simplistic nor entirely straightforward, and I think its recognition of the wear of modern warfare on the human psyche was ahead of its time.
This movie won’t bowl the audience over, and in today’s world, PTSD is not a revelation, but it’s still a good story with organic twists and turns.
1 Possibly dated Brit slang: demobilized, usually from emergency military service.
