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Showing posts with label Fritz Lang. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fritz Lang. Show all posts

August 26, 2014

Movie Review: Man Hunt (Blu-ray, Twilight Time)

Reviewed By: Hal Astell

I've seen a lot of Fritz Lang movies, having been stunned by M and Metropolis and so deliberately seeking out as many more as I could find. I was impressed to no small degree by films like Hangmen Also Die!, Scarlet Street and The Big Heat. I even thoroughly enjoyed 1956's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, the most recent film of his that I've seen thus far, though the quality of his films generally decreased as time went on, other films from the fifties like The Blue Gardenia, Moonfleet and While the City Sleeps leaving me surprisingly disappointed. The problem is that while some of his films are perennials on TV, my supply of Fritz Lang movies dried up at sixteen and I've only managed to see one more since 2007: Human Desire, again not one of his best, especially now I've seen the far superior original French movie that it remade. This one thankfully is much better.

Shortly before the war, as close as late July 1939, a British hunter called Alan Thorndike is holidaying in Bavaria and there is gifted with the biggest game of them all: Adolf Hitler, right there in the sights of his Hammond & Hammond. He even shoots him dead from 550 yards, or at least would have done had he a bullet in his rifle. When he loads that bullet, he's still only doing it to play the game, because it's the thrill of the chase that drives him. If he can get close enough to a game that doesn't want him to get close enough, then he knows he can kill and so actually doing so isn't necessary. Given what we know from history it won't surprise you too much to find that Hitler lives and we'll never know if Thorndike could have made the shot or not because he's interrupted by a patrolling German soldier, this being one of the most guarded buildings in the world, after all, and he's promptly delivered into the care of George Sanders.