Never seen any of these?
Well, you must be very, among other things, young. Check one of these movies out some day and you’ll be able to understand what “cloak and dagger” means as an adjective describing a movie.
As to the phrase’s origin, Phrase.org.uk offers this nugget, giving credit to none other than Charles Dickens:
Cloaks and daggers had been referred to in print prior to the 1840s but, if anyone can claim to have brought the expression ‘cloak and dagger’ to the English language, it was Charles Dickens. In Barnaby Rudge, 1841, he made a sardonic reference to the type of melodramas that employed the cloak and dagger as stage devices:
...his servant brought in a very small scrap of dirty paper, tightly sealed in two places, on the inside whereof was inscribed in pretty large text these words: ‘A friend. Desiring of a conference. Immediate. Private. Burn it when you’ve read it.’
‘Where in the name of the Gunpowder Plot did you pick up this?’ said his master.
It was given him by a person then waiting at the door, the man replied.
‘With a cloak and dagger?’ said Mr Chester.
All right. Here are more up-to-date media examples of “cloak and dagger”:
1. Emergency: A Personal History is a riveting and necessary account of the elite politics of the Emergency, and the way it impinged upon one family. Coomi Kapoor was a young journalist with The Indian Express. Her husband, Virendra Kapoor, was arrested during the Emergency. Her brother-in-law, Subramanian Swamy, was a cloak-and-dagger hero during the Emergency, who made a dramatic escape from India and an equally dramatic return to shake up the establishment. Kapoor is herself a first-rate political reporter and uses that to great advantage to tell the inside story of the Emergency.
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