Man Hunt
|
List Price: Our Price: $7.17 You Save: $7.81 (52%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $6.06 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Man Hunt
Movie Review: Dated hunt.
Summary: 3 Stars
I remember Man Hunt from when it first appeared many decades ago and recall it being a taut thriller. The cast is, of course, very good. But it now all seems so dated, in a Hollywood sense. The story line just does not hang together. The escape and pursuit lack continuity. The ending is staged. I'm not sure what the moral of the story is. Would Pigeon's popping of the Fuhrer been execution or murder? (Oh, yes, we know now what a good thing that could of been, but the movie's setting is pre-war.) I'm glad to have seen it again. But that's the last time.Movie Review: Interesting
Summary: 3 Stars
Perhaps in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock, this film could have been a classic.
As such, it is interesting if you have nothing else to do.
Definitely buy used.
Movie Review: Pidgeon hunt turns into a turkey shoot
Summary: 2 Stars
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 was 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.
Olly Buxton
Movie Review: Lang Yes, Pigeon No.
Summary: 2 Stars
Man Hunt is considered one of Fritz Lang's best films and an example of great film noir. I'm not so sure it is film noir nor am I sure it's one of Lang's best. The 1941 film stars Walter Pigeon and Joan Bennett, the third time the pair co-starred. Pigeon is best known for the dozen or so films he made with Greer Garson, two of which (e.g., "Mrs. Miniver", "Madame Curie") earned him Oscar nominations. I remember him best as the villain in "Dark Command" (1940) opposite John Wayne and as the scientist in "Forbidden Planet" (1956).
Joan Bennett is at her perky best in this film, the first of several she made with Fritz Lang. Indeed, she and Lang formed a production company together, making such memorable films as "Woman in the Window" (1944) and "Scarlett Street" (1945), both of them with Edward G Robinson. It's hard to believe such a talented woman is not as well remembered as she is.
Lang was one of the fathers of film noir and was called the "Master of Darkness". More than anyone else he popularized the German school of expressionist film, with "Dr. Mabuse" (1922), "Metropolis" (1927) and "M" (1931). Though he wasn't a Jew, Lang fled German in 1934 when the Nazis took over. He eventually came to the U.S. where he made such notable films as "Fury" (1936), "The Return of Frank James" (1940), and "Western Union" (1940). Lang was delighted to make anti-Nazi films, but in 1941 Germany was a good customer for the American film market, so the issue was a delicate one.
The film has a good supporting cast with George Sanders as an obsessed German major, John Carradine as a spy, and Roddy McDowall as a cabin boy.
Lang's photography is exceptional, but there are long pauses in the action that lead to boredom. Without Joan Bennett's perky cockney presence, the film would be deadly dull. There are also long periods of complete silence, and this too appears to be a major fault, although one can understand it from Lang's long history making silent films. On other occasions the music is clearly intrusive, even though it is scored by Oscar winning composer Alfred Newman who usually does a great job (e.g., "Camelot", "The King and I", "With a Song in my Heart").
Appearing before the U.S. entry into the war, but after the war in Europe was already in progress, the film has many anti Nazi sentiments. The idea that a famous big game hunter was loose in Germany stalking Hitler did give some solace to people in 1941, although in retrospect it seems a little silly.
Another silly aspect of the film is Pigeon's behavior once he arrives in London. He is afraid of every shadow. He runs away from puny little German guys half his size, and a fat old man who can barely walk sends Pigeon dashing into the shadows. Here's this "big game hunter", a strappingly large man who is bigger than any of his trackers. Lean John Carradine sends Pigeon scampering down 2 flights of stairs. What's up with this? It just doesn't make sense and dramatically looks silly. Perhaps there is a metaphor here, that the "strong" Allies really don't need to fear the "puny" Axis powers, but if so, it was lost on me while watching the film.
Of course, a Fritz Lang film is always worth viewing and this film particularly shows off some of his more subtle photographic techniques. And Joan Bennett is always worth watching and she does a great job here.
Movie Review: Astoundingly bad
Summary: 1 Stars
Preposterous twaddle executed in a bewilderingly amateurish and inept way -- or perhaps several since the incredible lack of continuity, tone, realism, plausibility, suspense, and much more combine with Walter Pidgeon's bovine attempts at charm to produce a cinema curiosity to rank with some of Fritz Lang's other stupendous failures. (I thought the German ambassador was actually played by Lang but apparently not -- they could have been twins.) If you cannot predict the ending from several timezones away, you are not actually alive.
I was eagerly awaiting this DVD and was totally surprised and disappointed by such dire crap (even with George Sanders and John Carradine -- maybe I can wash my mind out by watching Viaggio in Italia instead and for the umpteenth time).
Anyone want a DVD used once? (There may be a movie to be made about the making of this atrocious film and how so many talented people could be wasted so completely.)