Cloak & Dagger

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This article is about the movie. For the comic book characters, see Cloak and Dagger (comics).

Cloak & Dagger is a 1984 film directed by Richard Franklin starring Henry Thomas and Dabney Coleman. It is a remake of the 1949 film The Window.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Thomas plays Davey Osborne, an 11-year-old who lives in San Antonio with his father Hal Osborne, played by Coleman. His mother has recently died, leaving just him and his father, who is wrapped up in his military career. Davey is a lonely child and is still grieving over his mother, so he immerses himself in a fantasy world of games and imagination. Davey has one friend, Kim, (Christina Nigra) a girl who lives nearby with her single mother. Davey is interested in the world of espionage and his hero is the character Jack Flack from the game Cloak & Dagger. He wants to live an action-packed life like Jack Flack and he carries around a water pistol as his "gun" and a softball as his "grenade".

Early on we meet Davey's friend Morris, (William Forsythe) who owns a gaming shop in the local mall. Morris sends the two children on an errand, where Davey witnesses a murder. Right before the victim dies, he gives Davey a Cloak & Dagger video-game cartridge and says that the cartridge contains important military secrets. However, Davey gets in trouble when the police and no one else believe his story. It is at that point that the viewers learn that Davey actually carries on imagininary conversations with Jack Flack, also played by Coleman.

The spies, led by a man named Rice, track down Davey at his house. He escapes but the spies continue to chase him, eventually ending up at the Alamo. There Davey meets the MacReadys, an elderly couple (played by real-life husband and wife Jeanette Nolan and John McIntire). They appear to be helpful, but eventually we learn that they are working with the spies. Davey escapes them and then must race to defuse a bomb that the spies placed in Kim's walkie talkie. Along the way, Jack Flack tricks Davey into killing Rice, which makes Davey realize that the world of espionage is not for him and he is tired of playing the game. Jack Flack is "killed" at this point, forcing Davey to go the rest of the way without his guidance. In the end, his Dad rescues him from a hostage situation and Davey realizes that his Dad, not Jack Flack, is his true hero.

[edit] Video game tie-in

Critical to the movie's plot is an Atari video game called Cloak & Dagger. The game was under development using the title Agent X when the movie producers and Atari learned of each others' projects and decided to collaborate. This collaboration was part of a larger phenomenon at the time of movies featuring video games as critical plot elements (as with Tron and The Last Starfighter) and of video game tie-ins to the same movies (as with the Tron games for the Intellivision and other platforms).

Prior to the Agent X/Cloak & Dagger game's collaboration, the movie was to feature the game Donkey Kong.