Man Hunt (1941)
I discovered the existence of Man Hunt (1941) while searching for classic movies about close encounters with Nazis, and as soon as I learned about it, I knew I needed to see it for myself. Adapted from Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel, Rogue Male, Man Hunt is one of several anti-Nazi films directed by Fritz Lang, who was born in Vienna and made masterpieces like Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) in Germany but left for the United States in the 1930s. The cast includes well-known stars like Walter Pidgeon, George Sanders, Joan Bennett, John Carradine, and Roddy McDowall, but the real appeal here is the tantalizing idea of a man who has the opportunity to assassinate Hitler, wastes it, and then ends up on the run from both the Nazis and his own government for making the attempt. While Hitler was sadly still alive and committing atrocities in 1941, when the movie debuted, it’s a fascinating “what if” scenario that feels even more poignant when viewed in the wake of the horrors that followed the film’s release.
Walter Pidgeon leads as famous big game hunter, Alan Thorndike, who decides to test his skills by sneaking up to Hitler’s well-protected retreat and pulling the trigger of his empty rifle at the dictator from a great distance. Impulsively, Alan then loads the rifle, seemingly ready to take the shot for real, but is captured by the Nazis before he can fire. When he escapes after an attempt to make his murder look like an accident, Alan is pursued from Germany to London by ruthless Nazis Quive-Smith (George Sanders) and Jones (John Carradine), who want to force Alan to claim that his assassination attempt was ordered by the British government. Alan finds allies in a young cabin boy named Vaner (Roddy McDowall), and the charming Jerry Stokes (Joan Bennett), but the cat-and-mouse game with Quive-Smith leads to deadly consequences and a tense final confrontation.
There’s an often-visited question at the heart of this plot: “If you had the opportunity to kill Hitler, would you?” What’s striking, however, is that Household was asking this question in 1939 and Lang in 1941, so no Twilight Zone time travel premise is required. The author and film director couldn’t yet know the full scope of the suffering the dictator would bring to the world, but what they did know was bad enough to prompt them to imagine someone attempting to put a stop to it. When Household’s Rogue Male was published in May 1939, Britain was still pursuing its appeasement policy toward Hitler under the administration of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, but that ended when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Britain was at war with the Nazis when Man Hunt was released in June of 1941, but the United States wouldn’t enter the war until December, and both 20th Century Fox and Joseph Breen’s Hays Code Office balked at Lang’s depiction of the Nazis as blatantly evil (for more about the suppression of anti-Nazi films in Hollywood, see David Denby’s 2013 New Yorker article, “Hitler in Hollywood,” or take a deep dive with Thomas Doherty’s 2015 book, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939).
If the premise doesn’t convince you to watch Man Hunt, there’s the appeal of a cast packed with familiar favorites. Canadian Walter Pidgeon makes an attractive and believable big game hunter, and his pro-Britain role here presages his appearance in Mrs. Miniver (1942), which would earn him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Joan Bennett’s sweet face and youthful energy help to make up for her shortcomings in the accent department as Londoner Jerry, who falls in love with Alan as soon as they meet and refuses to abandon him in spite of the danger. Her portrayal encourages a sympathetic view of a working-class London girl who is depicted (but never identified) as a prostitute, which helps to explain, if not excuse, the offended snobbery of Alan’s sister-in-law when the two women meet. It’s a lot of fun to see Roddy McDowall, here making his American film debut after leaving England due to the Blitz, in his few scenes with Pidgeon, especially with both destined for more memorable roles in the five-time Oscar winner, How Green Was My Valley, which came out later the same year. While the good guys are engaging, however, the bad guys really keep the tension mounting. George Sanders is an eloquent, civilized devil as the Nazi Quive-Smith, so duplicitous that we know from the first scene never to trust a word out of his mouth, no matter how reasonable he tries to sound. Taciturn John Carrradine is perfectly cast as Alan’s constant pursuer, Jones, who first impersonates Alan and then relentlessly tails him until the two men finally face off in an Underground tunnel. As great as Sanders and Carradine are as villains, my favorite bit of acting in the film comes from Jewish immigrant Ludwig Stössel as the unnamed Nazi doctor who gleefully pushes Alan off a cliff. Stössel had fled Germany and then Austria to escape Hitler, and he also appears in Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), but you’re most likely to recognize him as Mr. Leuchtag in Casablanca (1942) from the scene in which he and his wife practice their English at Rick’s to an amused Carl (S.Z. Sakall).
Fritz Lang’s other anti-Nazi films in the 1940s include Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944), and Cloak and Dagger (1946). For even more classic movies featuring close encounters with the Third Reich, see Desperate Journey (1942), Lifeboat (1944), and The Stranger (1946). George Sanders plays another Nazi in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and an undercover agent in They Came to Blow Up America (1943), while Joan Bennett also gets tangled up with the Nazis as the heroine in The Man I Married (1940). Rogue Male was adapted again as a TV movie starring Peter O’Toole in 1976, and Geoffrey Household released a sequel to Rogue Male, titled Rogue Justice, in 1982. In addition to its premise, my own interest in Man Hunt stems from the significance of Rogue Male in Kaliane Bradley’s brilliant 2024 novel, The Ministry of Time. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in time travel stories or the doomed Franklin Expedition of 1845, and I understood Bradley’s use of Household’s novel much better after watching the film adaptation, even if the movie version changed quite a few plot elements.
…
— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub
Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.
Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.
