Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

Man Hunt Blu-ray Movie Review

Monocled Nazis also die.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 15, 2014

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.

After Thorndike is wrestled to submission by the Nazi soldier, he’s delivered to the monocled commander Quive-Smith (George Sanders), a man whose name seems to hint at Fifth Column tendencies (something the film alludes to as the Nazis or at least their sympathizers seem to be everywhere). That begins the central cat and mouse game of the film, though it’s all based on a kind of silly premise—that the Germans want Thorndike to sign a confession that he was attempting to assassinate der Fuhrer on the orders of His Majesty’s Government. Thorndike resolutely refuses to go along with this scheme, and is badly beaten (off screen). When he still refuses to comply, Quive-Smith just decides to toss him off a nearby cliff so that investigators will think that the intrepid explorer simply slipped and fell to his death. Unfortunately for Quive-Smith, Thorndike’s backpack catches in a tree limb on the way down and saves him, though he’s a bit worse for the wear.

He manages to get to a Danish freighter, where a quick thinking cabin boy (Roddy McDowall in his screen debut) keeps him from the prying eyes of local Nazi inspectors. Meanwhile, the ship takes on a new passenger—Alan Thorndike, or at least a Nazi agent pretending to be Thorndike (played by John Carradine). When the freighter gets back to London, the real Alan thinks he’s home free, but he finds himself ensnared in a web of Nazi bad guys, leading to him taking up with a Cockney working girl named Jerry Stokes (Joan Bennett). (In one of the more hysterical revisions required by the Hays Office, a sewing machine was forced on Lang as part of Jerry’s apartment set in order to domesticize her lurid profession. Evidently the censors never considered the fact that she might be sewing lacy camisoles and bustiers.)

One of the most interesting things about Man Hunt is how it depicts Britain in a time before actual hostilities had broken out with Germany (the film takes place in 1939, and it's not until the film's climax that Quive-Smith reveals Germany had just invaded Poland). Just as interesting is the fact that America in early 1941 was still officially isolationist (though the famous Lend-Lease Program was probably approved just about the time this film’s shoot got under way). That meant Lang, a Jew who had escaped from Hitler’s Germany and wasn’t shy about promoting a virulently anti-Nazi approach in his films, had to thread a very curious needle that took this odd kind of political balancing act into account. The fact that England wasn’t yet officially at war with Germany gave screenwriter Dudley Nichols a supposed out in one of the film’s more blatant artifices, that Thorndike needs to stay on the run because the English might extradite him to Germany (even in an appeasement prone Neville Chamberlain England, one doubts that would have happened). Ironically, America's refusal to “take sides” (again officially) meant that Lang had to bow to patently ridiculous demands made by the Hays Office, who felt that the Nazis were being portrayed too villainously. Yes, you read that right.

Still, this is fairly potent stuff for a 1941 film, with Nichols not trying to hide his liberal tendencies and Lang certainly out to vilify the Nazis as much as possible. That's probably nowhere clearer than in the demise of a central character (though again Nichols and Lang don't overtly show anything and the event is simply referred to.) These parts of the film actually bristle with excitement, something that the long detours with Jerry tend to at least slightly enervate. There's also a kind of screed like coda tacked on to the end of Man Hunt that is an obvious play for American sympathies to align against Germany's continued invasions of its neighbors. Though it took a late 1941 calamity to finally shock the United States into (re)action, Man Hunt shows that months before Pearl Harbor there were some already furiously ringing an alarm bell, trying to get people to wake up.

Man Hunt Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Rogue Male: The Making of Man Hunt (480i; 16:37) is a good featurette offering some cogent commentary by the likes of Kim Newman and Patrick McGilligan.


• Original Theatrical Trailer (480p; 1:50)


• Audio Commentary with Author Patrick McGilligan. McGilligan is a Lang biographer and brings a great deal of knowledge to this commentary. He provides an overview of Lang's so-called "anti-Nazi quadrology" as well as interesting factoids about the actors.


• Isolated Score Track is presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0.

Man Hunt Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.