War, torture, and the limits of control: Man Hunt, Time Limit on DVD

The story was already in circulation, how in 1934 Fritz Lang was summoned to a meeting with Joseph Goebbels where he was offered the position of Führer of the German film industry; how Lang, whose Jewish heritage Goebbels presumably wasn’t aware of, whose ex-wife, screenwriter and actress Thea von Harbou, had already joined the Nazi party, then fled Germany immediately with nothing but the clothes on his back. The story’s so perfectly in keeping with the pursuit narratives Lang favoured. Its likely at least partially apocryphal, but anyway makes a hell of a great set-up for Man Hunt (1941), the thriller Lang made for Fox, newly available on DVD, that opens with Walter Pidgeon lining Hitler up in his sights on the cusp of World War II. Like Powell-Pressburger’s 49th Parallel (41), Man Hunt was a rallying cry for Americans to enter the war, and it was that much more persuasive for being helmed by this visionary Viennese director who had abandoned a dazzling career in the very country he was urging his new homeland to attack.

Based on Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male (39), the film concerns big game hunter Alan Thorndike (Pidgeon), captured by SS guards after being found perched on a cliff near Hitler’s Obersalzberg home with rifle in hand. When Thorndike eventually escapes, Hitler’s Security Commander (George Sanders) relentlessly pursues him as he returns clandestinely to England, determined to get Thorndike’s signature on a statement claiming the British government ordered the assassination. Yet not only was Thorndike not given any such instructions, he wasn’t actually trying to kill Hitler at all. The rifle wasn’t even loaded. A proud sportsman, Thorndike just wanted to know if he could do it. So Man Hunt becomes the story of how one man comes to understand the Nazi threat, takes responsibility, and returns to the hunt with guns now loaded.

There are some distractions, especially with accents. Pidgeon, the Brit who sounds suspiciously Canadian, and Sanders, the German who sounds suspiciously English, actually fair better than Joan Bennett’s thinly veiled London prostitute. She’s the only one to bother attempting an accent appropriate to her character, though her broad Cockney grates like a rusty lawnmower. Fortunately she’s still lovely, sensual and sassy in spite of her character’s poutiness, and has some touching scenes with Pidgeon, who treats her more like a niece that the lover she wants to become. But Lang’s exemplary staging and camerawork is finally the reason to see Man Hunt: his beautifully rendered inserts; his exquisite use of silence and shadow; his subtle motifs, such as Pidgeon’s forest footprints echoed later by marks left on a floor by his feet when dragged out of a Nazi torture chamber; his haunting compositions, such as those involving water and night especially, or the tree-enveloped deep-focus scene that plays out in a single shot with Pidgeon stumbling away from the Nazis who hunt him through the dense Obersalzberg wilderness.

Moving ahead in time to reflect on America’s involvement in Korea and, indirectly, Hollywood’s ensnarement in the red scare, Time Limit (57) is another allegory involving responsibility, torture and the limits of patriotism. It concerns a former POW accused of collaboration with the communists whose refusal to defend himself prompts a conscientious military investigator to look deeper into his case. The title refers both to the pressure placed on the investigator to speed the ostensibly open and shut case along, and to the psychological limits upon which even the most formidable soldier breaks down and becomes malleable to the enemies’ dictates. The film came out during a time when brainwashing was an increasing concern, one that fed directly into the ideological paranoia of the Cold War.

Time Limit was the only film ever directed by character actor Karl Malden, who took on the project at the suggestion of the film’s star and producer Richard Widmark. Malden had by then firmly established himself as one of Hollywood’s most dependable talents, and his reputation is reflected in the pedigree of his collaborators. Besides the inimitable Widmark, who plays the investigator, the film also features excellent turns from Dolores Michaels as a stenographer who manages to be both sexy and smarter than most of her superiors, a very young Rip Torn in his first credited film role, a very vulnerable Richard Basehart as the guilt-ridden POW, and Martin Balsam, who as a desk Sergeant bullying Widmark to court-martial Basehart and get it over with, embodies the virtual flipside of the character he played that same year in 12 Angry Men. Cinematographer Sam Leavitt, who often worked for Otto Preminger, was behind the camera, which shifts seamlessly between the actors, who are the utter focus of Malden’s clean, crisp approach.

MGM’s DVD’s not great. The aspect ratio’s been reformatted and there isn’t even a menu. But the transfer looks sharp enough and the film itself is sleek and engrossing. It also speaks very much to this mentality that’s loomed over us these last several years, one that says treason is so heinous a crime that mere accusations equal culpability, while ignoring the fact that love of God and country is not itself enough to withstand the frailties of our minds when driven to their outermost limits.

Busting up the boys, singing those skeletal blues, a MacGyver of improvised bikinis: the inimitable Ida Lupino graces two of the finest Fox noirs

Man, oh man, Ida Lupino. Just one of her loaded little wordless hms is worth more than reams of dialogue from most other actresses. She was born in Brixton, schooled at RADA, but like so many of the elements that fed the best of American movies of the 1940s, and film noir in particular, her outsider's, specifically European perspective seemed only to heighten her contribution to the deep, strangely poeticized Americaness of her on-screen presence. Émigrés helped nurture what would eventually be tagged—the by French, of course—as the noir sensibility, its fatalism and chiaroscuro stylistic economy, but Lupino never seemed less than American in her toughness and resilience, her fundamental vulnerability and make-due-with-what-you-got glamour. If you didn’t know better, you’d believe that she, Gloria Grahame and Barbara Stanwyck all came from the same little town—and all three of them anxious to escape.

Moontide (1942), one of three new releases in the ongoing ‘Fox Noir’ series, and a major discovery for most of us, was a proto-noir especially informed by European tastes. Fritz Lang was its first director before the more utilitarian Archie Mayo took over, and Lang’s moody aesthetics remain very much intact. The film was the US debut of French superstar Jean Gabin, familiar to contemporary cineastes, if not the average American moviegoer, from his roles in films by Jean Renoir, who’d also crossed the Atlantic to work in Hollywood. Ever vigilant regarding his image, Gabin was exactingly involved in the script’s development, and apparently much to the project’s betterment. There was also a delirium sequence initially designed by Salvador Dalí, though it seems little of his ideas made it through the censors. But perhaps the most European thing about Moontide had nothing to do with the personnel at all: after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the West Coast location shoot was cancelled and the production moved into the studios, where the luminous artificiality of the sets, the foggy docks especially, endowed the film with its sublimely dreamlike atmosphere, which only increased the story’s already considerable air of dread and romance.

Based on actor Willard Robertson’s pulp novel, deemed unfilmable by many on account of its being too sordid, and adapted by novelist John O’Hara, Moontide begins with a night of expressionistic alcoholic oblivion, with dockworker and working class bon vivant Bobo (Gabin) emerging from his ominous blackout in front of a bait shack. A murder’s been committed, and Bobo can’t be completely sure he didn’t do it. Bobo’s pal Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), to be found that morning, get this, snapping towels against the naked ass of the flamboyantly monikered Nutsy (Claude Rains in an interesting but smallish role), suggest the pair skip town, but Bobo’s usual wanderlust is suddenly overwhelmed by his fascination with Anna (Lupino), a waif with a background too painful for her to share. He fishes from the sea one night during a suicide attempt, keeping the fuzz at bay by pretending to be her husband. Anna threatens to domesticate Bobo and bring his alliance with Tiny, apparently forged in blackmail and repressed homosexuality, to a grinding, ugly halt.

Moontide is drenched in neurosis, swarming with damaged psyches and astoundingly loopy romantic gestures—at one point Bobo gives Anna a prostitute’s dress as a symbol of his affection—yet its never less than buoyant thanks to the profound charisma of its leads: Gabin’s sensuous gaze, his easy, gypsy hedonism and rather chauvinistic optimism—he has a magnificently callous speech where he extols the virtues of breakfast as a balm for suicidal depression—matched by Lupino’s aching sense of weary regeneration, her unspoken recesses of darkness and immensely touching surrender to love, at one point caressing Gabin's fleshy face like a precious stone. The film in its way looks forward to In a Lonely Place (50), one of my all-time favourite noirs, in its tender, brooding study of a fragile connection between a younger, secretive woman and an older, violent man that no one seems entirely safe around.

If Moontide has spent most of its cinematic life unknown or under-appreciated, Road House (48) has remained something of a legend, rather difficult to see but now finally appearing on DVD, only months after the death of the great Richard Widmark, whose appearance here formed yet another triumphant follow-up to his unforgettable debut in Kiss of Death (47). Curiously, it finds Lupino again coming between a seemingly untamable virile type and a seemingly more civilized, well-heeled associate, oddly matched male buddies whose friendship is tainted by compromise. When Midwestern rural roadhouse proprietor Jefty (Widmark) comes back from his travels with “a new attraction from Chicago” named Lily (Lupino, suddenly blonde though looking only more like some strange creature from elsewhere), his intentions are clearly more than professional. But Lily, the picture of feminine independence, seems utterly disinterested in romance, her response to all of Jefty’s increasingly intense come-ons being little more than barely softened brush-offs or some variation of those wonderful little shrugging hms of hers. She remains impenetrable until she suddenly sets her sights on Jefty’s manager Pete (Cornell Wilde), and that's when all hell breaks loose.

Watching Lily and Pete’s courtship shift from mutual antipathy to desire—he’s anal about tidiness while she chain smokes and leaves her butts burning everywhere—is supremely pleasurable, even sort of surprising despite the conventions. It's nearly as pleasurable and surprising as Lily’s debut as the road house chanteuse. As Lupino unceremoniously plunks herself down at her mini-upright we hear bowling balls still knocking about in the background. But by the time she starts singing her stark blues number in that seductive, gravelly, idiosyncratic voice—has Cat Power, a.k.a. Chan Marshall, seen this movie?—there isn’t a single person in the joint who isn’t under her peculiar spell. The scene is magic, visibly stoking a flame within both the already swooning Jefty and the much cooler Pete.

The love triangle as originally conceived in the first versions of the script, something much discussed in the disc's supplements, strikes me as the source material for Blood Simple (84), though I've never heard the idea brought up elsewhere. But the story as it emerges here is at once more conventional and more emotionally pointed that was originally intended, building up to a last act that bristles with betrayal, manipulation and Jefty’s masochistic, maybe even suicidal mania. Indeed, Widmark steals the show in the final scenes, though there would arguably be no scenes to steal without Lupino’s  singularly beguiling presence charging every scene with attitude, conflicted desire and on-the-spot ingenuity—you’ll be amazed at what she can do with a few scarves during the scene where they go to the beach sans bikini. All of these qualities would come to shape Lupino’s groundbreaking work as a director: she was one of the first women in Hollywood to bust up the boys. But, as is evidenced in these films, she had already been rehearsing for that job for years.

Sweat, blood and explosions: Most masculine movies from Fuller and Daves discovered on DVD

I came to the so-called masculine movie genres not as a kid, which I guess is normally the case, but as an adult movie addict, mainly out of interest in the work of certain stars and directors who churned them out during the studio era. Maybe this explains the sort of child-like glee I now feel when DVD distributors lure a few more such titles out of the vaults. From my current vantage point, I can survey the films for their glints of complexity, their often impressive craftsmanship, but I also retain a sort of delayed, innocent awe for their particular brand of high adventure, rugged romance and male camaraderie.

Hell and High Water (1954) is  part of Fox’s ongoing DVD revival of the films of Sam Fuller, the American director whose wildly dynamic camera style and bold-faced studies of desperation and moral murk have helped to maintain his cult status. In keeping with Fuller’s yanked-from-the-headlines, eruptive style, Hell and High Water actually opens with an atomic detonation, the gaudy red credits splashed across a towering Technicolor mushroom cloud. “This is the story of that explosion,” the voiceover explains.

“That explosion” was actually produced in the Arctic in 1953 by then-unknown authors. Thus Hell and High Water is about an independent international group of scientists and politicos who arrange for a decorated WWII submarine captain (Richard Widmark) to lead a crew comprised of one male scientist, one female scientist (Bella Darvi) and a whole bunch of sweaty, shirtless, slobbering, chauvinist goofballs on a secret mission to find out who is behind the bomb, how they got it, and what their no-doubt devious plans are. But the film’s real highlights come from the details and bravura miniature set pieces: from sexual harassment to manual mutilation, from a China-centric rendition of “Don’t Fence Me In” to a brutal casualty suffered while interrogating a Chinese prisoner, Hell and High Water is well endowed in character, texture and audacity.

Widmark’s character this time out isn’t in keeping with the manic, hysterical losers he made his mark with in Kiss of Death (47) or Night and the City (50), but he’s cagey, conflicted and terrifically compelling in the film’s major turning points. The only significant supplement on the Hell and High Water disc is a typically hokey A&E Biography of Widmark, which shamelessly exploits his brother’s illness and death for cheap drama, but is fascinating nonetheless. Widmark is commonly known for being as clean-cut off-screen as he was deviant on, but it’s most curious to note that while still working as a schoolteacher in the Midwest, he took his summer holidays in Nazi Germany, trying to gather material for a documentary exposé on Hitler Youth camps.


I developed an admiration for the relatively forgotten director Delmer Daves after seeing Dark Passage (47), a brilliantly bizarre noir based on a David Goodis novel, full of hallucinatory subjective camerawork and featuring a killer cast of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Agnes Moorhead and Tom D’Andrea. I then discovered Daves’s enormously appealing 3:10 to Yuma (57), based on an Elmore Leonard western and featuring a very seductive Glenn Ford as the baddie. I can’t reasonably expect to find anything else in Daves’s filmography to match this pair, but I’m sufficiently motivated to check out his other films.

Broken Arrow (50), however, is neither another crown jewel nor a total disappointment. Set in 1870, it’s one of the very first westerns to attempt to come to terms with the genre’s racist tendencies, a self-consciously liberal-minded picture in which a gold-hunting loner (James Stewart) is drawn out of his neutrality in the hostilities between American expansionists and Cochise’s Apaches after having his life saved by an Apache teen—while still bearing witness to Apache torture methods in a chilling nocturnal tableau.

The film carries a balance of respectful anthropological detail mixed with the usual awkward casting of whites in the major Apache roles. Stewart is as convincing as always playing the stubborn moral authority, and the film never succumbs to any overly whitewashed characterizations of the other side. In fact, the final shoot out between some whites and Geronimo’s renegade warriors ends quite brutally. Founded in a spirit of colonial apologetics that now feels a bit quaint, it’s very much a film of its time—but not one without a few teeth, and more than a few incredible vistas. 

The sublime, the sanguine, and the verbose: three classic Fox westerns ride into town

Though only 35-years-old, Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck), the notorious killer with the unmatched quickdraw, seems to have outgrown what could be regarded as normal mortal existence. As he moves from town to town, an unassuming, solitary figure, his appearances are treated as apparitions. Hardly anyone actually sees Ringo, who is of course just an ordinary man. Rather, their eyes are betrayed by the grandiose abstraction of legend, blinded by the presence of some force they’re only heard of: a hero, a demon, a scapegoat, a target for every young punk looking to make a name for himself in the anarchy of the uncivilized West. But Ringo is preternaturally weary of this role and its trappings. He craves anonymity and domesticity. No longer wanting to live as a ghost, he explains, “I just want to be somewhere.”

The Gunfighter (1950), directed by Henry King, has been called the first adult western. It is indeed about the desires fostered by experience rather than innocence, and features an impressive line-up of characters that are each imbued with shadows, disappointments and inner conflicts, such as Marshall Mark Strett (Millard Mitchell), the guardian of Cayenne, the town that flies into a frenzy of excitement when Ringo arrives to arrange a secret rendezvous with the family he abandoned years ago. Strett says little, and his features give away even less, but his explanation as to how he gave up outlawry is pointed and brutal, something about a little girl slain by accident. In many regards, this film can be seen as a natural precursor to Unforgiven (92).

But the gloomy nature of these attributes should not overshadow the fact that The Gunfighter is also immensely charming, suspenseful and beautifully crafted, most especially by Arthur Miller, the talented cinematographer whose prolific body of work includes How Green Was My Valley (41), Gentleman’s Agreement (47) and Whirlpool (49). Miller’s roaming camera continually gives us such a rich, layered sense of space, whether that space is the inside of a barroom, the main street of a frontier town, or a windswept mesa. He finds an ideal collaborator in the mustachioed visage of Peck, whose performance here is elegantly measured and genuinely tragic.

Something closer to pure genre entertainment can be found in Henry Hathaway’s Rawhide (51), about a desert stopover for the US mail service being laid siege by a quartet of bandits. Following the murder of its senior keep, the fate of the stopover, and of the valuable cargo coming its way, is left in the hands of the very green young Tom Owen (Tyrone Power) and the by contrast tough, determined and big-haired Vinnie Holt (Susan Hayward), a young, unaccompanied waiting for transport with her niece in tow. Power was clearly too old for the role but his youthfulness goes a long way to correcting this, while Hayward, with her immaculate poker face, is perfectly cast as a guarded, highly capable woman of unflaunted inner fortitude. Stealing the show however is googly-eyed character actor Jack Elam as the lecherous, naïve and finally sadistic criminal Tevis, whose nadir of bad behaviour finds him taking potshots at a toddler. Fun stuff. 

When their California-bound ship falls into disrepair along the Mexican coast, gold-seekers Hooker (Gary Cooper), Fiske (Richard Widmark) and Daly (Cameron Mitchell), virtual strangers to one and other, amble into sleepy Puerto Miguel in the thick of siesta, the only locals on view being a barkeep, a few guys with moustaches and big hats, and a kittenish Rita Moreno purring out ‘La Negra Noche’ to the stirrings of a quiet guitar. The heat-addled calm is broken by the arrival of Leah Fuller (Hayward, again playing the tough cookie, with big, tough-looking hair), desperately searching for able bodies to accompany her on a long journey into the forbidding Apache-controlled territory where her husband lies, perhaps dying, in a collapsed mine. As much for something to do as for the hefty reward promised, the gringo soldiers of fortune take the bait, along with a good-hearted Mexican named Vicente (Victor Manuel Mendoza).

Also directed by Hathaway, Garden of Evil (54) is neither the sanguine good time of Rawhide nor the iconoclastic character-driven drama of The Gunfighter. Talky, decidedly unhurried and in its way weirdly mysterious, it strikes me as a story that, whatever its intentions might have been, above all concerns the unknowability of others. The set-up feels essentially random, recalling The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (48) but lacking that films focused, delirious greed and moral perdition. The deeper motivations of Hayward’s secretive character remain obscure, and trust is an ongoing issue for all, with characters swerving from redemption back to selfishness, and only Cooper’s wizened leader seems led by the best intentions at the best of times.

Shot in colour and Cinemascope, the film’s desert expanses and decrepit haciendas are wondrously spectacular, and the narrative thread never less than compelling despite its lack of urgency. It doesn’t hurt that Widmark especially is so watchable in the role most burdened with dialogue, nor that the pacing is marvelously anchored by Bernard Herrmann’s typically portentous, darting score. In a welcome departure from the norm, the audio commentary on Fox’s disc from Nick Redman, John Morgan, Steven Smith and William Stromberg focuses almost exclusively on Herrmann’s contribution and process and on the role of the composer in both classic and contemporary movies in general.