Man Hunt

Despite the involvement of director Fritz Lang, writer Dudley Nichols and stars Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett and George Sanders, Man Hunt is a gimcrack affair that, with its propagandistic heart on its sleeve may have had some purchase in its day but now would try the patience of a saint.

Walter Pidgeon plays big-game hunter Captain Thorndike who stalks Adolf Hitler in his Berchtesgaden summer retreat, not to assassinate him but just to see if he could. Chaps do this kind of thing, apparently (as America was still neutral at the time of filming an outright assassination attempt was probably considered too provocative) . He gets caught by Adolf’s Gestapo goons headed up by a monocle-wearing George Sanders. He escapes and stows away on a steamship back to England (with the help of a perky thirteen year old Roddy McDowell. Sanders and his goons (including John Carradine) pursue him but he eludes them with the help of a willing young Cockney lass (Joan Bennett).

Adapted from Geoffrey Household's novel ‘Rogue Male’ and made before America entered the war, Man Hunt is Boys Own Adventure stuff. Tongue-in-cheek it may be but its tiresome nevertheless.  Not only does the man hunt of the escaped Captain by the villainous Nazis seem entirely pointless but the narrative drags us through his Hays Code appeasing “gentlemanly” relationship with Bennett’s slapper (to the tune of the seemingly endless reiterated ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’).

Originally intended as a project for John Ford which explains the presence of Dudley Nichols, from its opening scene in an obviously fake studio forest when he gets a bead on Adolf then,somewhat oddly, gives him a mock salute, to the final shot of Thorndike parachuting into Germany to do what he should have done at the outset (one of the benefits of which would have been saving us from this movie) Man Hunt is more often risible than not. I don’t know if Sanders’ line “Today Europe. Tomorrow the world” was the first iteration of that oft-aired cliché but it’s the cherry on a stodge-filled cake.

There are a few nice things about the film. That opening scene is well-staged, a lot of trouble has been gone to to suggest foggy London Town with a purpose-built set recreating its Underground complete with train for a chase sequence, Lang’s use of his native German when the Nazis are talking is bold and Water Pidgeon, needless to say, is charming. But taken as whole Man Hunt is one for Lang completists. 

FYI: Lang returned with similar material and similar results in Cloak and Dagger in 1946. Household's novel was re-made in 1976 as a telemovie to somewhat better effect by Clive Donner. Entitled Rogue Male and with Peter O'Toole in the lead  as Sir Robert Hunter and Harold Pinter in a small role as his lawyer it revels in the public school Boy's Own Adventure spirit and, best of all, offers some kind of motivation for the story's initiatory action, perhaps omitted in the Lang version for political reasons.

 

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