Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Good movie but grossly overrated

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This film wastes no time getting started -- no speeches, no anthems, no introduction. We simply see a man (Walter Pidgeon) maneuvering between Nazis in some forested region. When he finally reaches the cliff, his destination, we see him expertly assemble a scope rifle and train its cross-hairs on Der Fuhrer himself. One can just about hear the 1941 audience shouting at the screen, "Pull the trigger! Pull the trigger!" Something goes wrong, of course, and our aristocratic hero spends the rest of the film on the run from nefarious Nazis led by George Sanders and John Carradine.Pidgeon is unusually animated in this film, and there are a lot of reaction shots of him which bear a similarity to Lang's work with Spencer Tracy (they hated each other) in his American masterpiece "Fury." Carradine and Sanders are suitably nasty, a lot of fun too watch (too much fun? perhaps that's a debate for another day). Joan Bennett shows up as a prostitute who falls for Pidgeon's man on the lam, exposing herself to fatal danger in order to help him and win his heart in return. Her accent is terrible but her performance is passable.Lang handles the suspense of the chase scenes around foggy London-town with great skill and style. The only real problem that I had with the film was in a lot of the dialog between Pidgeon and Bennett; Pidgeon always has a sort of paternal edge, but in this case it is more of a patronizing razor's edge. Hilariously, Bennett bursts into tears when Pidgeon chooses the couch over her bed, and Pidgeon holds her head and calls her a "poor, dear little child", or words greatly to that effect. There are a lot of those scenes. Certainly we're missing the vital and overtly sexual Bennett of later collaborations such as the infamous "Scarlet Street." In the Lang world, Bennett must either play a saintly whore or a predatory whore, and no room in between for argument or confusion.The climax becomes a little bit weird, but the film deserves props for actually allowing the Bennett character to die. The fact that her death, as well as the torture scenes involving Pidgeon earlier in the film, are shown strictly off-screen, may represent a compromise between producer Zanuck and Joe Breen's office, which was extremely cautious about anti-Nazi propaganda prior to the official U.S. entry into WWII. This is a significant film in the development of U.S. propaganda -- recent refugee Lang wants to pull no punches, but in retrospect (or compared to his later "Hangmen Also Die") the film's treatment of Nazi villains is almost light-handed, Hollywood villain-ish.Note, by the way, how Lang manages to get Sanders' monocle and the glasses of several other German spies to gleam menacingly in the scarce lighting -- Spielberg would later use this effect in his nostalgically anti-Nazi films. Considering how much attention Lang paid to his own monocle, it's hardly an accident or a casual effect.I was interested in the scene where Bennett and Pidgeon go into a jeweler's shop to buy her a hat-pin (the fatal hat-pin, as it turns out). After entering, the distinctly Jewish-looking shopkeeper speaks to them with a heavy German accent, and Pidgeon and Bennett's characters are visibly disturbed for a moment, then continue on with the purchase. This man may have been a refugee from the Nazis, but his accent makes him momentarily suspect. I believe Lang probably included this brief bit of business as a way of expressing his own frustration with the racism that was inevitably being directed towards German émigrés during the propaganda-heavy times leading up to the conflict.

Compact well directed drama of the dawning realization of the Nazi threat in Europe. A noir before that was a popular genre. Walter Pidgeon handles his role well, his suave dignity enabling him to move from the lighter tone at the start of the film to the serious one later on. Joan Bennett is a breezy delight as a practitioner of the world's oldest profession although the Hayes office ludicrously insisted she have a sewing machine in the corner of her room to make it appear she's a seamstress. She did some of her best work in Lang films, he was a tough director but she was herself a straight shooter who had no problem giving as good as she got enabling them to work well together through four films.

For me the central point of what is a multifaceted movie is one of ethics. Captain Thorndike is a big game hunter of repute who never shoots his prey, he gets it in his sights and then recognises that he's "won the game". He's essentially an anarchist in that he talks at several points about being against all forms of force (politically speaking some types of anarchists generally talk in terms of the path of least coercion). He is faced with a decision, which fortunately, few of us in the country where most of this film is shot (the UK), have to make any more. When one is faced with extreme murderous brutality (the Nazis), extinguishing personal freedoms, should one fight back with lethal force? People have called this aspect of the movie propagandist, a manipulative attempt to get the USA to join the war, but I think Fritz Lang poses this question in earnest and with his heart on his sleeve. Despite our distance from questions of such magnitude (the war against operations such as Al Qaeda has effectively been assigned to bureaus or outsourced, and do not ask these questions of us on an individual basis), it's a question which I found very involving.Fritz Lang's movie has in common with Powell & Pressburger's film from the same year, the 49th Parallel, that both treatments of the Nazis display a great deal of respect, leaving you to question on some level whether they don't deserve to win. Thorndike is both a rank below, and Lang suggests, an inferior hunter to, his nemesis the Nazi Major Quive-Smith. Only by breaking through British class barriers and finding love will Thorndike be able to triumph. Reference is made to the policy of appeasement and to appallingly stupid British officialdom, more evidence of a movie which is far from a stupid and absurdly partisan propaganda piece.Some of the movie comes off as a little odd, such as a repeated reference to the Nazis returning to decapitation as method of execution, which seems rather a minutia given that the UK and US were both hugely fond of capital punishment at the time. The love story creaks a bit and makes the middle of the movie somewhat of a longueur. Contrivances in the plot are acceptable, but may cross a threshold for some.On an aesthetic and visceral level there are some great tracking shots, and the Nazis have been appropriately fetishised. Popular modern belief that behind each swastika there was a caring sharing yet misguided person is hugely erroneous, death-worshipping pagans, members of what was a hugely ideological cult, being more accurate in my view. The shot of Quive-Smith and goons in Jerry's apartment is high-calibre work reminiscent of the expressionist silent work of the director's earlier years. Personally I found the fist fight hugely brutal and exhilarating, which is very rare in a movie of that period, or indeed any other. In terms of a "...from hell's heart I stab at thee" level of gusto, the ending of the movie is as electrifying as the famous ending to 13 Rue Madeleine.By the by Quive-Smith is an enormously interesting character. There's huge testament to Lang's subtlety in the Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle's Nest) scene. An outwardly confident character with no hint of turmoil stands next to a lampshade where votive music in Old German is written, "...nur deine güt hilft, mir aus den nöthen." ("... only you can help me out of my suffering"). In the next scene he is backgrounded by a sculpture of Saint Sebastian pierced through with arrows. This a wounded man, in need of putting out of his misery. Lang's suggestion regarding Nazis generally? Obviously a man of genius who snuck a lot of stuff about fate in under the radar.

As this is a Fritz Lang thriller, it has some very well directed scenes and some awesome photography. Unfortunately, the story is too often ridiculously stupid, and the filmmaking alone is never enough to overcome these stupidities. It also stars Walter Pidgeon, who is in general too boring to carry a movie. He plays a famed British big game hunter who has come to Germany to hunt the biggest game on Earth, Adolf Hitler. As the film opens, he gets Hitler in his sights, but, this being set before Britain was at war with Germany, it's all just a game to him. He does finally decide that perhaps he should waste the guy, but before he can do it, a soldier stops him and arrests him. Then there's this ridiculous scenario where the Nazis don't want to kill Pidgeon because they are afraid that it will start a war with the British, so they decide to fake a suicide by throwing the guy off the cliff. The Nazis ridiculously propose that they "accidentally" find his body the next morning. Of course, by then Pidgeon, injured but still alive, has run off. What kind of Nazis are these anyway? There are more ridiculously conceived plot points later on, and the film is never especially gripping anyway. I do like George Sanders and John Carradine as Nazis, and Joan Bennett is very good as a lower class gal who helps Pidgeon when he arrives back in England (although I hate the way he talks down to her).