Man Hunt
With Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett, George Sanders, John Carradine, Roddy McDowall, Heather Thatcher, and Frederick Worlock.
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I only half agree with Gunning. He has a point when it comes to Man Hunt’s simplistic, tub-thumping conclusion, yet this finale provides a precise and logical bookend to what might well be the most hair-raising opening of any Lang picture–which is equally propagandistic, though I wouldn’t trade it for anything that wasn’t. It’s also worth noting that Man Hunt, adapted from Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male, is the only one of Lang’s anti-Nazi features made before America entered the war. (Cloak and Dagger, the only postwar item in the bunch, provides another kind of bookend to his reflections on Nazi mischief.)
Man Hunt was conceived and largely prepared as a project for John Ford to direct–until he, never interested anyway, backed out at the last minute. It uses one of Ford’s favorite screenwriters, the prestigious Dudley Nichols, who’d already written such Ford movies as Judge Priest, The Informer, Steamboat ‘Round the Bend, Mary of Scotland, The Hurricane, Stagecoach, and The Long Voyage Home. Nevertheless, this is very much a Lang film, one he managed to make both characteristic and personal. It even has a claustrophobic cave at the end and a map of London the Nazi villain uses to track the movements of the hero.
In London, Thorndike is helped by a streetwalker (wonderfully played by Joan Bennett, who would go on to star in three more Lang pictures). Lang evaded the studio censors by agreeing to add an absurd prop to her flat, a sewing machine; in the highly codified world of Hollywood, it presumably goes without saying that prostitutes don’t sew. Studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck refused to allow a sequence in which Bennett’s character actually behaves like a streetwalker until Lang shot it at his own expense after hours, assisted by only a couple of his crew members, and showed it to Zanuck for approval. Bennett’s best moments come in a hilarious encounter with Thorndike’s sister-in-law (Heather Thatcher) and in a poignant moment when she bursts into tears after discovering that Thorndike doesn’t want to sleep with her. Just as Lang adroitly used the sound of his own untranslated native language to frighten American audiences, he used Bennett’s cockney accent to create a warm pocket of coziness and safety at the center of a malevolent universe.
