Glorious “Bastards”

Lessons in style by way of two new DVDs of old gems from Seijun Suzuki and Fritz Lang.

Lang himself knew the drop-weight value of a yarn, and with “Man Hunt” (1941), for him something of a Hollywood comeback, he established the coldblooded economy that he’d soon bring to full-on film noir. Consider this situation, transposed to contemporary times: a Hollywood plot hinging on the assassination of a standing world leader, made while the U.S. was still bound to a neutrality pact with the nation in question. “Man Hunt,” the first film ever to contemplate the assassination of Hitler, wasn’t actually a product of Lang’s nerve, but that of author Geoffrey Household and producer Darryl F. Zanuck. Still, Lang seized on the extra-civilized savagery of the story, having more or less scrounged for work between studios since he arrived in 1936.

The Hitler face-off is interrupted early on (in an insidiously silent five-minute intro), and the would-be gunman, Walter Pidgeon as a Brit big-game hunter on a lark, is captured and interrogated (by George Sanders, speaking perfect German and imitating Lang down to the monocle), then he escapes, and in this version of 1939, the Nazis have even infiltrated London’s pubs and bobbie constabulary. Significantly, his ambassador brother and the police cannot help without creating an international incident, and so even in the foggy rat-maze streets of London there’s nowhere to hide. “Appeasement!” Sanders’ SS officer shrugs with revulsion.

“Man Hunt” is Lang at his most deftly Langian, returning to the skyless urban shadowbox of “M” and the Mabuse films, and to entertaining moments of violence — like John Carradine’s date with the subway’s third rail — that are still surprising. (There are even moments of sexual frankness that somehow slipped by the Hays Office — when Pidgeon tells cheerful Cockney slattern Joan Bennett he’ll sleep on her couch, her grin drops like a curtain and she bursts into tears.) Arthur Miller’s cinematography is so high-contrast it seems drawn in India ink (Bennett is all black hair and white skin, nothing in between), and a montage that constructs a late chase scene fits together like a mosaic — all in all, it’s pulp filmmaking that makes its style tell the story, which is both a doozy and a political hand grenade for its day and age.

“Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards!” (Kino Video) and “Man Hunt” (Fox Home Entertainment) are now available on DVD.

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