Dangerous Partners (1945)

Dangerous Partners (1945) is a mystery buddy cheapo Nazi Edward L. Cahn film noir of obscure narrative and displaying a certain laxitude of pacing and insecurity of continuity, acted as such, told as such an almost ideaful and adventuresome manner to make it a variety of multi-stranded and free form unboxed version of noir, created on the hoof out of inexpensive and still quite directionless cinematics.

The first frames of Edward L. Cahn’s Dangerous Partners are not introductions but disruptions. We enter not into a scene set up for comprehension but into a disarray of wreckage: a plane crash, bodies, survivors, and the peculiar urgency of strangers trying to force open a briefcase. 

It is the cinematic equivalent of joining a chess match halfway through, the positions obscure, the stakes guessed at. This abruptness is both the film’s strength and its eventual undoing; its opening promises a noirish world in which the audience must keep pace with events or be lost, yet the film’s own narrative discipline falters before that promise is fulfilled.

Within the debris, two figures emerge: Mrs. Janet Ballister (Signe Hasso), sleek and unsentimental, and her husband (John Warburton), less composed and visibly unsettled. 

Their target is not the preservation of life but the acquisition of opportunity: a key to a briefcase taped to the back of an unconscious man. Inside are four wills, each naming a single beneficiary, Albert Richard Kingby (Edmund Gwenn), to receive one million dollars in bonds. The legal documents are not mere inheritances but coded instruments; possession of the wills and knowledge of a verbal passcode—reciting a menu backwards—can divert the wealth.

This odd combination of probate procedure and espionage device is a curious inheritance from the source material, Paper Chase (1940). MGM adapted and updated the novel’s premise, shifting the geographical origin from Mexico to the American Midwest and inflecting the scheme with the anxieties of 1945: the imminent collapse of Nazi Germany and the possibility that its agents were preparing elaborate escape routes. 

The film’s villains seek to channel wealth into clandestine postwar havens, an inversion of Allied financial vigilance. The wills are not benevolent gestures but laundering tools, designed to place millions in the hands of those who would use them to evade justice.

The Ballisters are not patriots. They are grifters. Their initial theft is opportunistic; their curiosity becomes calculated pursuit. When Kingby regains consciousness, the chase becomes mutual. The first of the millionaires listed in the wills dies while attempting to evade Kingby, an early indication that the stakes are not abstract. 

Violence enters abruptly into the otherwise clipped rhythm of the plot, and with it comes the figure of attorney Steve Caighn (James Craig), whose legal acumen is matched by his readiness to compromise it.

Craig’s Caighn joins forces with Janet Ballister after her husband’s death—a murder without emotional aftershock. Hasso plays Janet with the same froideur she brought to her Nazi spy in The House on 92nd Street, though here the malevolence is more mercenary than ideological. Her accent becomes a mask, a cultivated opacity that repels intimacy even as it tempts it. 

The chemistry between Craig and Hasso is less a romantic current than a temporary alignment of self-interest. They are linked by ambition, not affection, and their willingness to double-cross one another is assumed by the audience from the start.

This absence of a moral center is one of Dangerous Partners’s more subversive qualities. MGM’s wartime crime thrillers, even the B-unit quick turns, usually provided the viewer with a fixed point of ethical identification—a detective, a reporter, a soldier. Here, every principal is corrupt, from the confidence couple to the urbane Kingby. 

Only the late revelation that Kingby is a Nazi agent offers the audience a hierarchy of villainy, and even then, the reorientation feels contrived, a studio-mandated alignment with wartime propaganda. The opportunistic fraudsters are reframed as accidental patriots, their pursuit of the wills transformed into an effort to keep American resources out of German hands.

The Nazi element arrives late, a twist both improbable and historically resonant. By the film’s release in mid-1945, the American public was aware of German efforts to spirit away both personnel and capital before surrender. The film imagines such operations in miniature, stripped of geopolitical scale but charged with the noir logic of secret codes, hidden documents, and lethal pursuit.

In this sense, Dangerous Partners belongs to that subset of wartime cinema preoccupied with enemy infiltration of the American home front—a mode exemplified by Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942) and Henry Hathaway’s The House on 92nd Street (1945). Yet where those films exalt the perseverance of their heroes, Cahn’s picture lingers in the moral fog of its antiheroes.

Hasso’s Janet is particularly notable for the way the film positions her as both instigator and object. She is the narrative’s primary agent, the one who initiates the theft, who maintains pursuit after her partner’s elimination, and who adapts most quickly to shifting circumstances. Yet she is also made the locus of male desire, her intelligence framed as an extension of her allure. 

The late-stage "change of heart" engineered for her—a moral awakening upon confronting the full scope of Nazi perfidy—is a perfunctory restoration of the era’s gender norms. Until that point, her independence is almost unmediated, her calculations entirely her own. Seen against the grain, her eventual cooperation with Caighn in the name of patriotic duty reads less as conversion than as strategic adaptation.

Noir diner in Dangerous Partners (1945)

The casting of Edmund Gwenn as Kingby is the film’s most conspicuous inversion. Known for geniality and benevolence, Gwenn embodies here a methodical cruelty. His Kingby orders beatings, manipulates allies, and carries a revolver with unhesitating purpose. 

It is not merely that Gwenn plays a villain, but that he plays one so plausibly that the viewer’s memory of his affable roles becomes a source of unease. The role recalls his appearance in Foreign Correspondent (1940), another instance of malevolence cloaked in civility.

The supporting cast, in true MGM fashion, is a gallery of familiar faces in miniature parts: Audrey Totter as a nightclub singer whose performance of "His" is an ornamental interlude; Mabel Paige as one of the will’s beneficiaries; Stephen McNally (billed under his birth name, Horace McNally) as the ill-fated pilot. 

Such casting provides a studio-world continuity for attentive viewers, though here it also underscores the film’s secondary status in the MGM hierarchy. Karl Freund’s cinematography, usually distinguished by expressionist inflections, is largely functional, with only the crash aftermath bearing his signature visual interest.

Cahn directs with an efficiency born of B-picture schedules, the film’s seventy-nine minutes containing more plot pivots than emotional beats. This compression has the double effect of keeping the viewer engaged and preventing the story from deepening. 

The procedural mechanics of locating each will’s beneficiary dominate the middle portion, with each encounter offering a miniature morality play and, often, a corpse. The repetition builds momentum but also dissipates tension; the audience comes to expect death as punctuation.

From a historical vantage, Dangerous Partners is a minor yet revealing artifact of its year. 1945 was a moment of narrative transition in American cinema: the war ending but not yet ended, the noir cycle gaining coherence, the studios balancing patriotic imperatives with the public’s appetite for darker entertainments. 

The film’s late pivot to Nazi conspiracy allows it to serve both as escapist intrigue and as a reminder of vigilance. Its depiction of Americans living by their wits, skirting legality for gain, reflects a wartime acknowledgment that the line between self-interest and civic duty could be dangerously thin.

In the broader history of American film, Dangerous Partners occupies the liminal space between noir and propaganda thriller. Its moral landscape is noir: avarice as universal motive, alliances forged in expedience, danger as constant companion. 

Its visual style is less committed to noir’s chiaroscuro than to MGM’s house style, yet the thematic markers are present: duplicity, fatalism, the erosion of trust. What prevents it from being a pure noir is the studio’s insistence on ideological resolution, the closing assurance that its antiheroes have, however inadvertently, served the national cause.

And noting already, that the Queen of the Blues in 1945 was not Bessie Smith.

As a noir-adjacent work, the film is also instructive in its demonstration of how the genre’s moral ambiguity could be repurposed for wartime narrative ends. In peacetime noir, the grifters would remain grifters; in Dangerous Partners, they are retrofitted into agents of justice once the Nazi element is unveiled. 

The shift is unconvincing, yet it reveals the pressures under which the genre evolved in the mid-1940s, particularly in studio contexts less hospitable to sustained moral darkness.

If the film ultimately frustrates, it is because its moments of genuine intrigue—the disorienting opening, the macabre code, the unlikely menace of Edmund Gwenn—are diluted by contrivance. 

And yet, there is a certain fascination in its contradictions: a narrative without heroes that nevertheless seeks to affirm heroic ideals; a studio thriller that borrows the cynicism of noir only to disavow it in the final reel; a wartime picture that imagines enemy subterfuge in the quiet heartland.

In the wake of an aerial calamity, the narrative commences with a tableau of strange symmetry: an unconscious man, sprawled in the wreckage’s periphery, a battered briefcase at his side. Within, not the expected debris of commerce or travel, but four separate wills—each improbably naming this prone stranger as the sole beneficiary. 

The legal multiplicity hints at a labyrinth of motives, identities, and subterfuge, setting in motion a drama where material fortune and mortal peril intertwine. The air is thick with the scent of coincidence, which, in such fictions, is rarely innocent.

Parallel to this discovery, a recently bereaved widow enters into an uneasy alliance with a man whose aims, while ostensibly aligned with hers, carry the faint tang of opportunism. Together, they embark upon a calculated pursuit of wealth—money for which her late husband had paid the ultimate price. 

Their quest is neither sentimental nor purely mercenary; it unfolds as a negotiation between grief’s necessity and greed’s allure. Through a series of tense exchanges and cautious manoeuvres, they edge closer to seizing the windfall, their collusion a study in pragmatic morality.

Just as their grasp nears the prize, the past quite literally rises from the wreckage. The very man found insensate amidst the plane’s detritus reasserts himself—not merely as a beneficiary-in-waiting, but as something more malign: a self-proclaimed Nazi spy. 

His declared intent is chilling in its economy—procure the money, then purchase his way back into the arms of the Reich. Here, personal ambition mutates into geopolitical menace, and the plot’s stakes swell from private gain to the shadowed expanse of wartime treachery.

Yet the spy’s gambit founders in the face of the couple’s sudden rectitude, or perhaps their recognition that moral theatre requires a suitably noble dénouement. The predator is subdued, the illicit fortune is relinquished, and the funds are redirected—not into private coffers, but into the austere hands of government. 

In this final act of patriotic renunciation, the film both affirms and ironizes its own moral arc, offering closure in the guise of sacrifice, and hinting that, in times of war, virtue is often indistinguishable from strategic performance.

It is tempting to imagine what Dangerous Partners might have been in the hands of Hitchcock or Huston—directors capable of maintaining ambiguity to the end, of letting the grifters remain grifters. 

As it stands, the film is an intriguing mess, its very incoherence a reflection of the moment in which it was made: the last months of a world war, the first stirrings of a postwar cinematic mood, and the persistent allure of danger as both plot device and moral condition.

Dangerous Partners (1945)

Directed by Edward L. Cahn

Genres - Action-Adventure, Crime, Mystery-Suspense, Romance  |   Release Date - Jun 7, 1945  |   Run Time - 74 min.  |