GamerTab That was an excellent one.

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

JoeKulik In general, I don't believe that any government has the right to use a legitimate Art Form, including Cinema, as a vehicle for propaganda, but most times I can live with it. This film, however, is S-O-O-O Filled with trite, "over the top", and even laughable propaganda that it comes across more as a Farcical Comedy rather than a Suspense Drama for me here in 2016.So, Thorndyke aims a rifle at Hitler for "sport" rather than because he intended to kill him? (LOL - Give me a break, OK??) Why the Germans would expend all the time & resources to track down this one guy all over England is never made clear, & is extremely unrealistic. That Thorndyke never acts on the fact that Jerry is obviously in love with him comes across as him being Just TOO Stupid to realize how she feels, rather than any chivalry or gallantry on his part. Only an IDIOT would've allowed Jerry to stay in that same apartment after he knew that the Nazis tracked him there. The outrageous ending, with Thorndyke literally deserting his military unit so that he can now hunt Hitler "for real" is from Deep Outer Space, or even from an alternate Bizarro Universe. Thorndyke living in a cave while wearing a suit & tie... Well, you get the idea.If I was a Brit watching this in 1941, I would've been worried for my country because of FOOLS like Thorndyke defending it, rather than to be inspired to feel Patriotic. On the other hand, it might have been a "wash" since the Germans were depicted as being Equally Moronic.I still gave it a "6" though, because it was an entertaining & suspenseful film, if you sent your brain on vacation while viewing it, that is.Although this film is interesting for several reasons, overall I found it to be an insult to my intelligence. ... joseph.kulik.919@gmail.com

chrissso This is one of those over-dramatic films from the early forties that soon became a thing of the past ... thankfully! Seriously, compare this to Casablanca which came out about the same time and you can see an amazing difference! In short this film is quite simple ... which was completely driven home by that horrible ending !!! The musical score for the film stinks (blaring brass) and the chemistry between Pigeon and Bennett was horrific (who calls a sexy woman a little monkey). On the other hand the 2 main Nazis guys (Sanders & Carradine) were quite good ... and it was cool to see a very young Roddy McDowell. Finally the film lacks very little historical significance. Don't waste your time! 4/10

funkyfry 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.

jjnxn-1 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.