THE MAN WITH A CLOAK (1951)

Determinedly oddball little picture set in a New York City of a previous century, when, going by what you see on screen, the entire population apparently consisted of the dozen or so principal cast members, and exactly one policeman. Manages to mix in a little French history, a fitfully persistent theme about idealism v. life-tarnished cynicism, and a murder mystery format that ultimately fails to contain either a murder or any great deal of mystery.

Joseph Cotten busts plenty of acting chops playing some sort of alcohol-sodden roué, who is part amateur detective, part stony-broke bum, part rather voluble ‘man of mystery’ type, and kind of a freelance good Samaritan, although one who appears to be constantly on the make. At the behest of an innocent French girl (Leslie Caron, who is so saintly, it becomes somewhat nauseating), Cotten investigates the strange case of a rich old buzzard of a former French general who is tucked up in his mansion, surrounded by a couple of servants and his kinda-sorta mistress/carer (Barbara Stanwyck) all of whom seen keen on the old boy popping off sooner rather than later. Everyone in the picture is after his money, for one reason or another, and maybe Cotten is too, as far as we know.

As the Leonard Maltin guide says quite rightly, we don’t find out the true identity of Cotten’s character until the last shot of the picture. What it doesn’t say is that when we have found out, we still don’t know why that guy is involved in this story, or what relevance his identity has to any part of the story. In short, they may as well have revealed at the end that it was Cardinal Richelieu, or Lou Costello, or Trigger the Wonder Horse as they guy they actually chose, although the choice the writers made WAS kind of a cool one.

But the picture’s got atmosphere, holds the attention, squeezes a little suspense, and, apart from Cotten’s turn as the cloak-wearing chappie of the title, Barbara Stanwyck does some screen-holding underplaying in a performance that manages to convey a considerable downstairs conflagration lurking somewhere under the petticoat-region (this kind of thing is something of a Stanwyck standby), and Jim Backus affably steals scene after scene (that was his standby) as a garrulous publican.

Having sat through the entire movie and watched it reasonably intently, I can honestly say that from a storytelling point of view, I’d still be struggling to detect what the point of the exercise was. My assumption would be that to the director *, if not the various hands credited with story and screenplay as well, the motivations of the various featured characters – and in particular the comparisons between youthful idealism, aged cynicism, and various shades of morality, avarice, and jaded pragmatism in between – were of considerably more interest than meeting any generic expectations of a typical crime-based movie. I guess you have to give them points for headstrength, in the unlikely but appealing circumstance that being headstrong had a noun-form version.

Beyond that, as mood pieces go, it establishes a mood. It also holds the attention, if in a hazy and somewhat indescribable way. And that’s about the works. However, if you like to see something a bit different among your vintage Hollywood job lot, this might just about fit the bill, or at least kill 81 minutes in relatively painless fashion.

(7 out of 11 on this site’s trademark MPHOAH scale)

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* I’d never previously heard of The Man With a Cloak director Fletcher Markle. From a quickie look-around on imdb.com, it seems that most of his work was done for television, and most of that on shows no-one has seen for decades. His most striking career entry is that apparently he was an uncredited screenwriter on Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai. Who knew?

** I can’t even work out the title, much less the rest of the picture. Why is he ‘the’ man with ‘a’ cloak? Think about this for a second. If you were asked to describe some guy you’d seen in a bar or wherever, presuming this is all happening in an alternate universe where they still wore cloaks, you might say “Oh, you mean the man with the cloak!” or you possibly might admit that you’d seen a man with a cloak. I can’t think of any conversational circumstance where a person would describe someone else as “The man with a cloak”. Even “A man with THE cloak” I can kind of imagine coming up in conversation, if THE cloak had magical powers, or was worth $20,000, or was a key piece of evidence in a murder investigation or something. But not “The man with a cloak”. Who would say that in that fashion, other than something entering the very early rounds of their first serious bout with the English language?

There’s nothing in the picture to explain this quirk of expression in the title either. But then there’s nothing in the picture to explain why the Joseph Cotten character turns out to be who he does either. There are some solid clues as to who he is. I think I picked just about every last one of them up as well. There’s just absolutely no reason to connect them all and arrive at his true identity, because that identity has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. It’s like they put together a locked-room mystery set in some isolated chalet in the 17th Century, featuring a range of suspects like the cook, the maid, the butler, the cheating husband, the vengeful wife, and then at the very end, the murderer is revealed to be the Green Goblin from the Spider-Man comics, who hasn’t turned up anywhere in the rest of the picture.

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