Fritz Lang's Man Hunt is a strong and classy entertainment engineered with the precision of a Swiss watch; or should I say Zeitwächter? Landing dead-center in the German director's prolific career, it tells the story of a hunter betrayed by nature, an attempted murder gone wrong, and the spy games that arise when nothing less than the stronghold of Hitler's Third Reich is at stake.

Upon a cliff overseeing the home of the führer, Englishman Captain Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon) watches the tyrant through a crosshair. He pulls the trigger and an empty click vibrates the screen before the hunter takes out a bullet and loads it into the chamber. As in most of Lang's works, it's the most minor of things that tip the needle. Thorndike is captured by commandant Quive-Smith (George Sanders, a figure of disciplined menace) and asked to sign a contract that gives Germany motive to invade England. He refuses; they push him off a cliff.

Lang spent much of the 1940s and '50s hopping between Hollywood studios and Man Hunt came in the middle of a four-picture deal with 20th Century Fox which ended, abruptly, when he was replaced during the filming of Moontide in 1942 by comedy director Archie Mayo. Thusly, Man Hunt has a certain studio picture quality to it that belies its dark subject matter. Pidgeon plays Thorndike as a good sport at every turn, even as he survives the attempted murder and becomes a stowaway on a ship heading for his home country. Once there, he finds that he is being followed by several Nazi spies, including Quive-Smith. He takes up with lovable guttersnipe Jerry (Joan Bennett, sporting an ungodly Eliza Doolittle accent), attempts to go into hiding and, eventually, partakes in an overwrought yet gripping final joust of wits with Quive-Smith.

Shot by Arthur C. Miller, who would lens Pidgeon once again in John Ford's masterful How Green Was My Valley that very same year, Lang sticks mainly to shadowy interiors, crafting some evocative images out of Jerry's apartment and a bravura chase through the London Underground and down a subway tunnel. Spies run amok and death seems eminent, but Dudley Nichols' script makes time for endearing moments between the gentleman Thorndike and artless Jerry. The scene where Jerry introduces the Captain to fish and chips and that excellent sequence where she gets caught to make sure he can get away have nestled themselves quite nicely into the folds of my frontal lobe.

Nothing in Lang's career matched his German work, especially the massively influential M and his Mabuse films. But as earlier this year I found myself with little company in my devout love for Tony Gilroy's Duplicity, the realization came that there is a lot to be said for expertly crafted works of pure entertainment. Man Hunt has moments of ingenuity and, at times, reflects the prowess of its creator but it's also a testament to sheer talent. Even when it came to fluff, Lang handled it with a crafty mind and a concentrated eye.