The attitude “One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead” seems to inform much of “classic” movie criticism, but it’s hard not to be massively disappointed by Man Hunt, no matter what Leonard Maltin and his friends might think. Fritz Lang – director of silent colossi such as Metropolis and M, manages to show only how much talking can spoil a perfectly good art form.
Parts of Man Hunt are beautifully framed, but they tend to be static scenes: Thorndike and Jerry on a bridge with a trail of street lights fading into the London fog; a darkly framed underground station wherein a limping German with a black trencher and a cane – a prototype for Herr Flick of the Gestapo if ever there were one – pursues our hero.
Here, I confess, I am scrabbling around for something positive to say. If we forget the artful cinematography, what we are left with is low grade melodrama.
The plot is quite absurd: In 1939, a famous British huntsman Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon, making no attempt at all to affect a British accent) is apprehended in Austria taking aim at Hitler with a high-powered rifle. He is relieved of his passport and ordered to sign a confession that he is an assassin in the employ of her Majesty’s Government, which is presumed to be likely to spark an international diplomatic incident (on the eve of Germany’s invasion of Poland!).
Absurd enough, but then Thorndike escapes on a ship back to London, thanks to a Roger-the-Cabin-Boy performance from a 10-year-old Roddy McDowall. Losing your prisoner, you would think, would entirely blow the value of any confession. But no, the hun are determined, and pursue Thorndike back to and then around London and its underground and even deep into the delightful Dorsetshire countryside of Lyme Regis.
Along the way Thorndike meets the unfortunately named Jerry, a working girl (Joan Bennett, toting a cockney accent that would have made Dick Van Dyke wince), for whom the film grinds to a halt for thirty minutes to allow Thorndike to gratuitously patronise her, and Jerry to pine winsomely for Thorndike whilst all the while mangling the traditional London dialect to the horror of onlooking rich folk such as Lord and Lady Risborough, who had no apparent function in the screenplay other than to reinforce social stereotypes. Of course, being pre war Britain there’s no intimacy, let alone sex, to liven proceedings but amusingly Lang does have Thorndike stretch out suggestively on a couch in Jerry’s apartment while a well-placed tower rises magnificently on a sheet behind him, Austin Powers style. Fnarr Fnarr.
Eventually the action gets going again, and we quickly find Thorndike holed up in a muddy cave with a monocle-endowed kraut outside still imploring him to sign the confession (Germany by now having rolled into the Sudetenland, annexed Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland, making the putative diplomatic embarrassment to Her Majesty yet more questionable) and declaring, po-faced, things like “Today Europe, tomorrow ze WORLD!” and from there the film rolls to its dramatic, implausible conclusion, backed by the same shrill and melodramatic music which has been assaulting the senses fro the outset.
At the end of the day it is Fritz Lang, so my critical brethren will feel obliged to give Man Hunt the benefit of the doubt (though surely there are limits: bizarrely Time-Out described it as “bleak, complex and nightmarish”, which if true I missed completely), but it is really hard to see a modern audience of ordinary folk (assuming no interest in this as a cultural artefact) having much time for this at all. You would hardly say that of Metropolis.
Indeed, if ever there were an demonstration of precisely what cinema lost when it added sound, then watching this back to back with Metropolis would make alles klar.
Film Rating: 
Director: Fritz Lang
Stars: Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett, George Sanders
Runtime: 105 min
Country: USA
