Man Hunt (1941)

I admit it:  I took some classes at VCU for easy A's.  Looking back, some of them were the best courses I ever took.  So there.  One was ARTH 271 History of Motion Picture II with Mike Jones.  So much learned, so many memories, dare I say a "defining life experience" or two.  I was walking home on a post-rainstorm gloomday.  Staring at my feet most of the way, looking at my sneakers hitting the sidewalk cracks, I was in what I would now call a dissociative state.  The trauma was Rashomon.   

I have worn out the assigned text, A History of Narrative Film, aka "The Cook Book."  It is now falling apart and is still one of my top reference books.  At any rate, I wish I had read this sentence on pg 365 much more carefully:

"[Fritz] Lang directed another twenty-one films in the United States for a variety of studios between 1938 and 1956, but only him film noir masterpiece, The Big Heat (1953, Columbia), achieved the quality and depth of his greatest work."

With my age 20 brain, I internalized that as:  Later Lang sucked. 

Until I fell into They Shoot Pictures, Don't They's thrall, which puts 16 Lang in their Top 1000, half of them post-38, that was still pretty operative in my noggin.  Now Scarlet Street stands at #50 overall on my personal list.  It has the most brutal dismantling of a noir patsy I have seen to date and barrels through the Production Code's stop signs in virtue of the sheer force of its hatred of all of the characters.

Man Hunt is pretty good too.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Recommended also:  Hangmen Also Die, Rancho Notorious, Human Desire.

The first sentence on VCU's cinema department homepage is "Do you love films your friends really hate?"  LOL.  I'm lucky I always had cool friends.