The character:	Captain Alan Thorndike
The actor:	Walter Pidgeon
The movie:	Man Hunt

A person seeking revenge against the Third Reich makes it his mission to assassinate Hitler by using the best tools at his disposal. This is the Melanie Laurent plot in Inglourious Basterds, which is a movie everyone loves, but it’s also the Walter Pidgeon plot in Man Hunt, a movie which does not have nearly the same hold on audiences. Man Hunt is no less outlandish than Inglourious Basterds. This is a movie where, at the beginning, a famous hunter sneaks into Hitler’s compound and lines up a shot which would end the Fuhrer before the invasion of Poland. Towards the end, that same hunter uses an arrow-shaped hatpin, Bullseye-style, to kill the Nazi officer who has been hounding him across multiple continents. This is not realism. It is the story of a man who does not have the appropriate resolve, and the consequences that come from refusing the best part of himself at the most opportune moment.

Thorndike is a gentleman sportsman, an idea which is a little quaint today but which was still recognizable in the 1940s. To my own pointy-headed mind, this is another way of saying that Thorndike’s favorite pastime is to kill things. Count Zaroff had the right idea in The Most Dangerous Game; it’s not really sport when you are both smarter than your quarry and you’re carrying a gun. I’m more inclined to credit Mallory and Irvine as sportsmen than someone like Thorndike, for the sport is one in which humans have all the disadvantages and Everest has every edge. There is, relatively speaking, little danger for Thorndike as he endeavors to shoot lions and tigers and bears. Something has pushed him to the danger of bringing his rifle to Hitler’s forested headquarters, and for the first time, the sportsman must reckon with an enemy that has the power of thumbs and guns of their own.

It’s too baroque for my taste to blame World War II on Captain Thorndike, as if one man killing another man could eliminate the history to come. We can still blame a death on Thorndike, one that he put in motion as soon as he got the idea in his head to hunt Hitler. A young woman, Jerry (she’s spunky because she’s got a boy’s name), falls for him. Her death is shocking because it occurs offscreen. Steven Spielberg gets treated like he’s the only person to figure out that something which happens offscreen can be just as frightening as what happens onscreen, but long before Jaws, Fritz Lang outdid any example from Spielberg’s career. The initial Nazi plan to get rid of Thorndike was to dump him off a picturesque cliff; Jerry, a city-dweller, dies from the indignity of being dumped out of a window.

What makes Thorndike heroic, in the end, is that he faces himself. The final sequence of the movie features Pidgeon jumping out of a plane with his gun already in hand, planning to infiltrate Hitler’s lair once more in order to finish the job that he should have finished long before. He has been irresponsible, and it has cost the life of a young woman who died for him. He has been effete. No more. The sportsman, the one who killed for the pleasure of taking life, for the feeling of superiority it built up in him, is attacking Everest.