An English hunter on a "sporting stalk," decides to make Hitler his target.
After two indifferent but fun westerns of all things, Fritz Lang was lucky enough to direct this espionage thriller with a pretty good screenplay from Dudley Nichols.
Probably the World War II propaganda aspects and some of the portrayals of the British as shall we say stereotypical Englishmen date the film, but this spy stuff is a film genre that Fritz Lang practically invented on his own.
All of Fritz Lang's trademarks are here, shadows, fog, a secretive spy network, a larger than life hero and the beginning of Lang's infatuation with the actor Joan Bennett who he used in several films. If the film was kind of a bunch of cinematic cliches even in 1941, Lang really knew how to use those cliches.
Since the United States was officially a neutral country for most of 1941, Lang was forced to make a number of changes in the finished film, playing down the Nazi torture scenes and the bad Nazis. In spite of those compromises this seventy year old film has a number of pretty good scenes.
The ending of Manhunt is still pretty effective.
105 minutes.
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