7.1 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.9 |
British hunter Thorndike vacationing in Bavaria has Hitler in his gun sight. He is captured, beaten, left for dead, and escapes back to London where he is hounded by German agents and aided by a young woman.
Starring: Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett, George Sanders (I), John Carradine, Roddy McDowallWar | 100% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
Music: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Walter Pidgeon, the avuncular, somewhat professorial father figure in such iconic films as How Green Was My Valley and Mrs. Miniver, might not be the first actor who springs to mind when confronted with the description “rogue male”, the original title of the serial (and subsequent novel) upon which Fritz Lang’s 1941 anti-Nazi drama Man Hunt is based. Man Hunt begins with a justly celebrated sequence which sees famous British big game hunter Captain Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon) emerging from a dense forest and finding a preferred spot on a cliffside’s rock outcropping. He takes out his rifle and gets—something in his sights. That something turns out to be nothing (or no one) other than a certain Adolf Hitler, supposedly enjoying the mountain air at his retreat in Berchtesgaden. (Having spent some time there myself, the Fox studio “recreation” of this location is not especially convincing.) Thorndike seems to be toying with the idea of actually shooting the dictator, but perhaps is only proving to himself that he could if he wanted to. After thinking about it for a moment, Thorndike actually loads some ammunition into his gun and prepares to really fire away, at which point a pesky German guard stumbles across him and leaves the world safe for any number of future attempts on Hitler’s life and/or films like Valkyrie. Exceedingly far fetched but never less than completely riveting, Man Hunt finds Lang, then still a relative newcomer to American shores, working in a kind of thriller mode that has echoes of Alfred Hitchcock, as a lone fighter for justice attempts to elude a seemingly global conspiracy of evil.
Man Hunt is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.33:1. Though the elements here have some minimal signs of age related wear and tear, over all things look very good here, with sharply delineated contrast and nicely modulated gray scale. There are some recurrent issues with slightly variable clarity, but things like the omnipresent London fog that Lang employs to evoke a suitably mysterious mood resolve perfectly here, with no signs of artifacts or noise. That ubiquitous mist does tend to make many sequences look fairly soft. Legendary cinematographer Arthur C. Miller, who along with several other cast and crew from this picture moved on to How Green Was My Valley (winning an Oscar in the process), lights this film in a deep chiaroscuro, almost proto-noir, style. That results in an intentional loss of shadow detail (one climactic battle in a subway tunnel is almost impossible to see). Fine detail is quite commendable in close-ups (see screenshot 4). Grain is intact and natural looking.
Man Hunt features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track that perfectly supports this largely dialogue driven film. There are no real issues here, with midrange frequencies sounding nicely full bodied and no signs of distortion or clipping at other frequencies. Alfred Newman's moody score sounds fine.
Man Hunt plays upon what was beginning to be something of a parlor game in the United States at the time, fantasizing about taking Adolf Hitler out with one punch (as in the iconic Captain America comic) or a bullet (as in this film). The whole idea of "sporting stalk" (i.e., stalking quarry but not actually killing it) is belabored to the point of absurdity here. It actually doesn't matter if Thorndike really wanted to kill Hitler or not; the important point is that the audience wants him to (or wants to itself). That kind of hand wringing is one of the patently artificial elements of Dudley Nichols' screenplay, but in other ways Nichols nicely captures the flavor of an isolated individual taking world shaking events into his own hands. Some of Lang's other anti-Nazi films (like Hangmen Also Die, due on Blu-ray in just a few more weeks from Cohen Film Collection) are typically held in higher esteem than Man Hunt, but there's a lot to enjoy here, including Lang's typically fluid and nuanced camera work. Technical merits are generally strong and the commentary is excellent. Highly recommended.
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