Another Angry Expat: Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent

A few weeks back, I looked at Fritz Lang's film, Man Hunt, an anti-Nazi film Lang made after World War II started but before Pearl Harbor. Like Lang, Hitchcock was a European director who had come to the States; like Lang, he hadn't left his political convictions behind. Foreign Correspondent (1940) was Hitchcock's second American film; Rebecca came out just four months before. Hitchcock, it would seem, adjusted to Hollywood quickly.

Man Hunt is an anti-Nazi film, while Foreign Correspondent is a pro-British one. Lang's film, for all its praise of England, is at heart a denunciation of fascism. Hitchcock's is a celebration of England and a call to America. The penultimate scene pokes fun at American neutrality, while the final scene is a call to defend America. The bombs are falling on London and the protagonist, John Jones (Joel McCrea), knows the States, for all their isolation, are not safe.

Foreign Correspondent seems a sort of transition film for Hitchcock; though his stars are American, his scene is Europe. About a third of the film takes place in Holland; another half of the film is set in London. Hitchcock obviously couldn't shoot on location; one wonders what he thought as he recreated the streets of his beleaguered hometown on some California soundstage. Interestingly enough, Hitchcock finished shooting the film before the Blitz proper began – the final bombing raid address is a prediction of what London would be like... just five days after Hitchcock shot the scene.

Though a German directed the movie, Man Hunt's Germans seemed to lack all redeeming traits. They were vicious, cruel, treacherous, and sadistic. Foreign Correspondent, interestingly enough, attempts to humanize its villains. They use a peace organization as a front for espionage. They murder, they lie, and they torture. Yet the script also brings repeated attention to the head villain's patriotism – and to his conflicted feelings about his methods. In the end he even manages to redeem himself at the cost of his life.

I suppose I could talk about the movie's suspense set pieces, but it seems somehow redundant. Foreign Correspondent is a Hitchcock film, so of course the movie gets suspense right. And need I say that the film is extremely well-shot? There are no scenes quite so iconic as the crop duster sequence in North by Northwest or the shower in Psycho, but windmill, hotel, and plane crash sequences are all very fine. The last is especially impressive given 1940's technology – it's far less fake than similar scenes from the era. Even a rear-projection car chase somehow manages to look creditable. There's also a surprisingly bloody assassination; the censors must have been blinking, because there's quite a lot of blood about the victim's head.

I don't have too much to say about Foreign Correspondent's plot; it's twisty, it's good, and it's best experienced by watching the movie. The cast is also extremely good, and, as usual for Hitchcock's early work, very funny. There are far more innuendos than some might expect, though nothing quite so scandalously funny as North by Northwest's Freudian final shot. As in The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock inserts a few stage Englishmen with funny accents and goofy names. One is a Cockney villain who meets a bad end, but the other, Scott ffolliott (sic!) manages to hide a stiff upper lip under his goofiness and "old boys." He's a fine counterpart to Caldicott and Charters, the cricket-obsessed comic relief of The Lady Vanishes – they too were far tougher than they looked. Ironically enough, George Sanders, who plays the most wicked of the Nazis in Man Hunt, here stars as a quintessentially English hero.

Though Foreign Correspondent is something of a propaganda film, it doesn't suffer from politics. The US wasn't in the war when the film came out, so there's less flag-waving than in some other Hitchcock films. Yes, America is great in Foreign Correspondent – "The Star-Spangled Banner" even plays over the credits – but most of the film is far more subtle than later Hitchcock productions like the tediously American Saboteur. Hitchcock trusts that his audience can figure out who the good guys are. Given the quality of the script, the direction, and the acting, it's not surprising to learn that Foreign Correspondent received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. It lost, but I doubt Hitchcock was too disappointed. The winning film, after all, was his own Rebecca.

Foreign Correspondent isn't my favorite Hitchcock film – that's North by Northwest – but it remains one of his best and has aged extremely well. Or, rather, it has hardly aged at all.

And now, review done, a technological digression.

I watched Foreign Correspondent through Netflix's new PS3 streaming feature. I was quite impressed with the Netflix program; the image quality, if not perfect, was never distractingly bad, and the film never hiccuped or stalled. The movie cut out before the end of the credits, however, which was a bit odd. My main problem with the Netflix PS3 disc is the interface. You can view your "instant queue," watch movies from it, and even take movies off of it, but you can't search for the films to add to it. Besides your instant queue, Netflix offers a list of "Movies You'll Love" and a whole set of genre categories. The "Movies You'll Love" section is nice, but the genre categories are a mess. They're not organized alphabetically, or, as far as I can tell, by expected interest. You will find gems (Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes!), but there are literally hundreds of bad movies that get just as much ad space. Do we really need to stream Chained Heat 2? Despite my quibbles, however, the Netflix PS3 disc is pretty wonderful. I look forward to spending a lot of time with it.

Lang Stalks the Dictator: Man Hunt and Rogue Male

There's a legend that Joseph Goebbels offered Fritz Lang an official propaganda position in the Nazi Party and that Lang fled Germany the very night of the proposal. Film historians have cast doubts on this fine story, though parts of it remain plausible. The Nazis, ironically enough, really liked Lang's great anti-totalitarian film Metropolis; Hitler himself was a fan. Lang, unlike other brilliant directors, never did sell out to evil. Lang made propaganda films, it's true, but he made them for the right side.

Lang's 1941 film Man Hunt was apparently somewhat controversial at Fox. Lang made the film after the Second World War began, but before the US entered. Filmmakers were supposed to be, if not neutral, then at least not stridently anti-Nazi. Lang, however, knew the Nazis too well to bow to Fox's political correctness. Man Hunt is an angry, even furious, film, and all the better for it.

The protagonist of Man Hunt is Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon), a British aristocrat and famous hunter. Thorndike, though a great shot and a brilliant stalker of prey, has sworn off violence. When he gets an animal in his sights, he doesn't pull the trigger; he knows he's won. The film opens with Thorndike in Germany, "hunting" a wicked and well-guarded man: Hitler. Thorndike gets the dictator in his sights, but is rudely interrupted by a Nazi soldier. The German villains beat and torture Thorndike and then throw him off a cliff so his death will appear an accident. Surprising no one save the inept fascists, he lives. Thorndike escapes Germany in a few short scenes, then returns to London to romance a whore with a (surprise!) heart of gold (Joan Bennett) and evade vengeful German agents played by George Sanders and John Carradine.

Man Hunt is an adaptation of Geoffrey Household's classic thriller Rogue Male. Though the plot of the film is quite close to that of the book, Lang's adaptation of the story still seems somewhat loose. Some aspects of the film surpass the novel; the ending's melodramatic plot twist is far, far more effective in Man Hunt than in Rogue Male. Inevitably, however, Man Hunt lacks the solitary feel of Rogue Male. In Household's novel, the unnamed hero spends much of his time alone and in hiding; though not surrounded by colorful supporting characters, his tale is nonetheless enthralling. Given the nature of the cinematic medium – and the desires of the 1941 movie audience – Lang had to make huge changes to the source material.

This post is really about Man Hunt, but I figure I should briefly "review" Rogue Male. Though it's shorter and slower-paced than most modern thrillers, I found it more compelling than most anything produced today. I read it in a day and liked it enough that I plan to hunt down used copies of other Household novels. Whatever faults it might have, especially regarding the narrator's psychology, Rogue Male has become one of my favorite books of its genre.

Rogue Male delights in the minutiae of the unnamed protagonist's escape to England: We learn how he evaded hunters and dogs, how he stole new clothes to replace his ruined ones, how he recuperated hidden on a river island, how he disguised himself to rent a boat, etc. It's all very interesting and suspenseful, but not traditionally cinematic. In the film, Thorndike stumbles away from the Nazi hunting party... and the film cuts to him rowing into a harbor and seeking out an England-bound boat. Later in the movie, Thorndike hides out in the countryside and outfits a cave with food, a slat-and-straw bed, and a concealed entrance. The film doesn't delve into the dwelling's construction and, more importantly, doesn't properly convey its claustrophobia. In Rogue Male, when the villainous faux-gentleman who calls himself "Quive-Smith" seals up the cave, it's horrific. The narrator-protagonist describes the dirt, grime, stench, and general horridness of the situation so well that I shuddered. Lang's cinematic take on the ordeal is far less harrowing – Lang's cave seems far larger and far cleaner than Household's. Household's cave scene – forty pages and a tour de force – occupies maybe ten minutes in the movie. Both film and novel, however, make Quive-Smith and his cronies thoroughly loathsome; the hero's eventual revenge is a triumphant moment in both. Once Thorndike scrupled to kill the animals he hunted, but he comes to realize that violence is sometimes a necessary evil. Appeasement and neutrality are no shield against radical evil.

Man Hunt's biggest departure from Rogue Male comes with the introduction of Joan Bennett's character, Jerry. There is a small romantic plot in Rogue Male, but it takes place before the main action of the book; it's more a sketch than a story. For large portions of its running time, Man Hunt stops being a thriller and turns into a romantic comedy. It's a trifle awkward; Thorndike's paternalistic speeches ("My child") to Jerry are especially cringeworthy. And while the Jerry plot initially seems shoehorned in, it has a very good payoff. One question remains: Why is the female lead in a film so full of wicked Germans named "Jerry"? Aren't the jerries the villains of the piece?

As he demonstrated earlier in his career, Lang could do both gleamy and gritty, both shiny and seedy. In Man Hunt, Lang emphasizes the physicality of his characters and settings. Though we're introduced to Thorndike as a carefree Brit abroad, he's shortly beaten and scarred; when he flees the Germans after his cliff fall, he's entirely covered in marsh filth. When his pursuers come across his abandoned boot, Lang fills the screen with its muddy decrepitude. Instead of making a star-studded trifle, Lang chose to emphasize the cruel reality of the Nazi threat. These are real people, the camerawork suggests, and they're after you. It's no surprise that the last scene includes newsreel footage of the Battle of Britain. Lang is angry and wishes his audience to feel as he does.

Some films, like Casablanca, can entirely transcend their propagandistic histories. Man Hunt isn't quite on that level, but it remains both thoroughly watchable and (generally) exciting in late 2009. Given that Fritz Lang directed, I can't say that I am too taken aback. The romantic scenes may seem forced, the special effects old-fashioned, and the violence tame, but Man Hunt shows its age far less than most of the era's films. There are a lot of bad political films being made today. Skip them and watch Man Hunt, a political movie and a minor classic.