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.

Table manners: a good pool movie is hard to find, but Turn the River's not bad

There’s this moment in Turn the River (2007) where this guy who sells phony passports waits for a client in a pool hall, one of these gloomily slick looking joints where the proprietor actually brushes the tables, where everyone seems to be on the make, and amateurs don’t feel too welcome. Passport guy’s been waiting for a while, killing time shooting stick on his own, and once his client finally arrives he can’t keep himself from venting his sheer annoyance at the game, its tedium and unforgiving geometries. His client, who happens to be a lithe lady pool shark, someone so attuned to the game she actually sleeps on a pool table, tells him the reason he doesn’t like pool is simple: he sucks.

This moment struck me because, well, I suck. Okay, I can probably beat my grandma best two out of three, but basically I stink. Yet I love pool. Which means that I steer clear of halls like the one in Turn the River, sticking to musty dives where the sticks are warped and the tables shabby, booze-stained and uneven, where the jukebox is always in the way when you need to make that decisive shot and everyone’s too drunk to bother noticing how we bend all the rules just to stretch our buck as long as possible—that much more time to sip beer and listen to the happy snap-drawl of those chalk-smeared spheres rolling along the spot-lit green expanse. How, you might ask, can I enjoy something so much when I’m so bad at it? I don’t know, blame it on the movies maybe.

I probably saw The Color of Money (1986) on pay-TV a dozen times as a kid. I remember my astonishment, even then, at how much I actually kinda loved Tom Cruise, how perfect he seemed as the young hot shot, how elegant and infinitely more alluring Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson was, the aging version of some other young hot shot from some movie of 25 years ago I’d never seen, and how Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the woman with tenuous allegiances to both men, was the most intriguing of the three. But mostly I loved the atmosphere, that is, of the game as it played cinematically. And it’s a good thing I dug The Color of Money as much as I did back then, since, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor, the field of pool movies would prove either barren or badly tilled in the subsequent 20 years.

I knew zilch about Turn the River, but it had Rip Torn, a friendly quote from critic David Edelstein on the case, and a rather fetching cover image of Famke Janssen confidently handling a cue stick. It’s the writing/directing debut of Chris Eigerman, a seasoned actor, which perhaps explains why he wanted to make what is essentially a character study in the New Hollywood vein, a movie about a loner who lives out of a truck, apparently owns maybe two outfits, has what we call “a past,” and does one thing really well: beat the pants off of cocky pricks, taking them for all they’ve got in merciless rounds of one pocket. Every character study is of course also a study of milieu, and Turn the River promises viewers a 92-minute plunge into those long-neglected pool halls.

Kaily (Janssen) is wearying of the hustling life. We know this because whenever some old acquaintance sees her again—like Torn’s crusty sage—they always tell her how she looks like shit. (I just kept thinking, “Dude, that’s Famke Janssen. She looks good.”) She’s got a plan to snatch her estranged preteen son (Jaymie Dornan, a great find, with a goofy, Tobey Maguire smile that catches you off guard) from his dad and head for Canada, exactly the sort of lame-brained plan that these loner antiheroes always seem to make, but hey, people do stupid stuff in real life, too. All she needs to do is build up some serious funds for those passports…

The movie’s not bad. It does indeed generate a pleasingly distinctive air, lurking along the peripheries of the tables, echoing those theatrical overhead lights in other interestingly stylized scenes, and even offering a colorful array of eccentric supporting characters to back up Janssen’s genuinely compelling, textured lead, like Kaily’s ex, a sad dad nakedly jealous of his own son, and Kaily's ex's mom, an overbearing Jesus freak. But the movie’s awkward, too, and doesn’t quite earn its tone, faux-urgency, or ending. That this is Eigerman’s first feature is fairly obvious to anyone with even a passing habit of nitpicking—did those same two extras just pass by three times in the last 30 seconds, walking in the same direction?—but what matters is that Eigerman seems to have decided on what kind of movie he wanted to make before he actually made it, failing to capitalize on what he actually had in the can. To narrow it down, I’d argue that the biggest single problem here is actually the music, which comes courtesy of Clogs and is perfectly interesting in itself, but steals all the potential humour—sorry, but sleeping on a pool table should be funny, guys—and the actual sense of studying this character, rather than just dunking her in a bath of generic indie moodiness. …Still, she looks just right craning her long body over those tables.