Art of Verbal War

In hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima's Ground Zero, comics have shown a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma.

Fritz Lang was in peak form as a Hollywood studio director when he made Man Hunt (1941), a terrific thriller whose title, like so many things Langian, cuts two ways. First, Capt. Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon), celebrated English big-game hunter, is caught near Berchtesgaden just as he's drawn a bead on Adolf Hitler. Thorndike claims he had no intention to shoot, it was just "a sporting stalk" - a notion mystifying to his Nazi captors, who aim to parade him before the world as a British government assassin. There follows a harrowing escape, in a forest primeval straight out of Die Nibelungen, and now it's Thorndike who's the quarry, pursued across Europe and home to foggy London - not that he finds much refuge there.

A couple is waiting in a station for a train to Venice. On the platform, Julien tells Marie he's leaving her to meet another woman. He leaves her alone, pregnant with their child. Upset, Marie refuses to be the victim. She finds comfort in her work along her two 'cowboy' bosses, Jean-Jacques and Jean-Loup, who run an art house theatre specialized in American classic films. A few weeks later, Julien comes back and Marie accepts to start over again.