Trivia / Cloak & Dagger (1984)

• Acting for Two: Dabney Coleman plays Davey's widowed dad and Jack Flack, and unusually he isn't cast as a Jerkass.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Dabney Coleman as a super spy and a concerned father, neither of which are an asshole or sleazeball.
  • William Forsythe, who generally plays hoodlums, plays a nerd in this film.
  • Louie Anderson, the rolly-polly comedian, has a cameo as a rough-looking cab driver who brushes the hero off.
• Production Posse: Director Richard Franklin, writer Tom Holland and composer Brian (the first two Mad Max movies) May (no, not THAT one) all worked on Psycho II - well... May almost did Psycho II; Universal granted a larger budget, making a bigger name available.
  • Several actors were also associated with the Psycho franchise. John McIntire played Sheriff Chambers in the first film, his wife Jeanette Nolan was the uncredited voice of Mother, and Henry Thomas went on to play young Norman Bates in Psycho IV: The Beginning.
• Shout-Out: Many to the works of Alfred Hitchcock:
  • The storyline of an Everyman caught up in an espionage plot is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s spy thrillers (The 39 Steps (1935), The Man Who Knew Too Much, Notorious (1946)).
  • The “boy who cried murder” storyline is lifted directly from Rear Window.
  • Like in The 39 Steps (1935), the Big Bad is a spy whose true identity is exposed by a distinctively-disfigured hand. In both cases, the spy is someone the main character thought they could trust and were seeking aid from.
  • Much like Psycho, the protagonist has an imaginary alter-ego modeled on an absent parental figure. Both characters also have dead mothers.
  • John McIntire and Jeanette Nolan both appeared in Psycho.
• Real-Life Relative: John McIntire and Jeanette Nolan, who play the old couple, were also married in real life.
• Technology Marches On: The MacGuffin is an Atari console cartridge.

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