Man Hunt (1941 Fritz Lang)

In 1933, Lang was approached by Goebbels to run the Third Reich's film programme. He agreed to everything, then immediately fled to Paris, leaving all he owned behind. Which I doubt made him very popular with the Nazis. I wonder then, in his later career in the US, whether he was constantly looking over his shoulder, wondering who might be a Nazi spy, who might be coming to assassinate him...

This comes to mind watching Man Hunt, which admittedly Lang did not originate - it was a finished script by Dudley Nichols (an adaptation of Geoffrey Household's novel 'Rogue Male', also a 1976 TV movie with Robert Powell, adapted by Frederic Raphael) - about a man (played by Gary Cooper) who is relentlessly pursued by Nazi spies throughout almost the whole picture.

There's definitely a toughness, a violence, that is inherent in Lang's WWII pics - an anger. Which is good. But this film also includes a couple of real sweethearts in the shape of helpful cabin boy Roddy Macdowell, and prostitute Joan Bennett. She's a prostitute? Yeah, apparently. I don't think it matters much one way or the other now, but of course they weren't allowed to depict her as such. In fact, in the last scene she's in, where she deliberately comes over like one on the bridge, so the policeman will be distracted by her - Zanuck didn't want that scene filmed at all. So Lang and cameraman Arthur Miller had to essentially fake that set - a bit of cobbles, a lamp-post and a string of ingeniously placed lights.

Lang himself, talking to PB: "Everybody knows I like women very, very much and I resent any man who treats women as though they were lower than he...And this part Joan Bennett played, of the little streetwalker who falls in love with Pidgeon - a love that is doomed from the beginning - I must admit, had all my heart." OK, her accent is diabolical, from the Dick Van Dyke school, but the performance itself is indeed touching. (They made several other films together, including Scarlet Street.)

Talking of Miller, triple Oscar winner in the 1940s, he was proud of two shots. The first is that boom shot at the beginning with the camera moving down through the trees until it sees the foot-print - that was actually filmed in reverse. The other was the shot where Pidgeon is trapped in the cave and he sees Sanders' face through the hole. The hole was shot and lit perfectly first, then a second exposure was made of Sander's face, so that both look pin-sharp.

Also in the film are John Carradine, Ludwig Stossel, Heather Thatcher and Frederick Worlock. The music's by Alfred Newman and it was made by 20th Century Fox.