A film expressly designed to lure the US into the war in Europe, 1941’s Man Hunt is also Fritz Lang’s attempt at a rollicking The 39 Steps-style yarn, with dashing about, derring-do, stiff upper lips, local colour and a man/woman yoking-together that’s got everything Hitchcock had except handcuffs and his exquisite sense of pace.
It bogs down, in other words. But only towards the end. Up till then this is a fast-moving story about a tweedy secret agent of some sort, who is caught red-handed while lining up his rifle’s telescopic sight on Adolf Hitler. When interrogated by the Nazis Captain Alan Thorndike’s defence is that he had no intention of actually killing the Führer. He is a big game hunter and this was merely an exercise in dry stalking, he says, the thrill of the chase rather than the kill being all this red-blooded Englishman needs to get his thrills. The Nazi interrogating him, a Major Quive-Smith, does not believe this story for one second and spends the rest of the film trying to get Thorndike to sign a piece of paper admitting he was on an assignment from the British Government.
Geoffrey Household’s original novel, Rogue Male, was first published in 1939, when a piece of paper might plausibly have been the difference between war and peace. By 1941 the idea that a signed document is going to alter things very much when the entire continent of Europe is already at war is a nonsense. Preposterous though it is, this document remains the plot driver for the rest of the film, as Thorndike is tortured, escapes, stows away on board a ship bound for England, and then is chased around London by Quive-Smith and various henchmen, all keen for him to sign at the foot of the page.
Plot to one side, Lang’s storytelling technique is superb, with gorgeous, gliding camera movements and swiftly executed scenes, and he leans heavily on Arthur C Miller’s beautifully crisp cinematography to summon up a dark and noirish London where enemy agents lurk in every shadow.
As the hunted man, bluff, avuncular Walter Pidgeon shrugs off early hesitancy to make a good everyman. Thorndike is, to borrow a phrase from the time, a decent sort. George Sanders plays the imperious monocled Nazi – Quive-Smith is probably meant to be a British collaborator, his name an echo of Quisling, the Norwegian Nazi collaborator. Either way Sanders speaks excellent German (so native German speakers say) but is otherwise playing the “high-class sort of heel”, as he once described the many characters he played throughout his career. There’s a debut performance by Roddy McDowall, 12 maybe, as the cabin boy on the ship Thorndike hopes will spirit him to England, and he’s funny as the plucky kid striking grown-up poses.
But most of all there is Joan Bennett, in the first of five films she’d make for Lang, as Jerry, the wide-eyed Cockney sparrow Thorndike turns to for help after being chased all over the East End of London by Quive-Smith and his various henchmen (among them a cadaverous John Carradine). Bennett’s Cockney accent is terrible but she gets beyond it with a performance that’s perky as hell.
Thorndike and Jerry are from opposite sides of the tracks and most of the second half of this film’s enjoyment comes from watching big sap Alan repeatedly failing to pick up on the fact that Jerry has fallen for him. Bennett’s semaphoring as a damsel in distress is amusing but she really comes into her own in the Pygmalion-esque cultures-collide scenes where Thorndike introduces her to his brother, Lord Risborough (Frederick Worlock) and his good lady wife (Heather Thatcher, also particularly good).
Towards the end Pidgeon finally unloads the big speech that is the whole point of the movie, in which he brands Hitler a “monstrous tyrant” and Sanders helps him along by revealing that this war is a case of “Today Europe, tomorrow the World!”. This sort of thing alarmed isolationist politicians in the USA, who soon set up a Senate Investigation into Motion Picture War Propaganda. But then came Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the USA four days later and suddenly films like Man Hunt were what it was all about.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
