Film

Man Hunt (1941)

Director: Fritz Lang

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

While far from Lang's finest, definitely a superior thriller, set on the eve of World War II. Sadly but inevitably jettisoning much of Geoffrey Household's superb novel (Rogue Male), it follows Pidgeon's big game hunter from his arrest by the Gestapo (after taking a 'practice' shot at Hitler), through his escape back to England, to his final, brutal conflict in the Dorset Hills where he has been pursued by Sanders' marvellously sinister Quive-Smith. The evocation of England is pure Hollywood nonsense, Bennett's prostitute is too coy and saddled with an atrocious Cockney accent, and the sequence with McDowall's cabin boy the stuff of Boy's Own. But the basic theme of hunter-and-hunted survives intact, beautifully expressed in taut scenes like Carradine's stalking of Pidgeon through the London Underground. Forget the shortcomings and the propagandistic finale, and you have a gripping noir thriller, bleak, complex and nightmarish.

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