Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Gig Young stars with Lynne Roberts, Mary Anderson, and Gerald Mohr in "Hunt the Man Down," a 1950 B film.James Anderson is an escaped criminal who makes a mistake by stopping a robbery where he is working. His face is shown in the newspaper, and he's immediately recognized by law enforcement as Richard Kincaid, who was on trial for murder and escaped 12 years earlier.Anderson is assigned a public defender, Paul Bennett (Young) who listens to his story carefully. Anderson met some strangers who invited him to a party; he was in an altercation with the husband of a woman he was dancing with; Anderson took a gun away from the man and left, after threatening to kill the man himself. He threw the gun on the bed, though no one admitted seeing it, but later, the husband was found dead. It's a tough story to break, and it falls to Bennett and an old detective (Harry Shannon) to find the witnesses. Twelve years earlier, they had been couples; now, one man (Willard Parker) was blind from the war and believed his wife (Cleo Moore) dead (though she had left him), the victim's wife had remarried a man at the party (Gerald Mohr) who had dated someone else; another had split with his wife and had become an alcoholic.The detective and Bennett realized they were on to something when the witnesses started being attacked and/or killed.Someone on this board said Gig Young made a bland Robert Mitchum type in this noir. The way this was directed was less noir and more documentary, which was a style for crime films around this time. For that style, Young seemed right and very public defender-like.The one thing never addressed was why the wife and her husband, the man killed, slept in separate rooms. I mean, wouldn't someone have asked about that?One character in this film was mentally unstable, but I can't figure out from the cast list which one she was. It's just as well -- her acting was abominable, totally off the wall.This film comes to the defense, as it were, of public defenders, a much maligned group. So often in the media, they are denigrated and shown as the reason people are found guilty.My sister worked for the PD office and would often hear from potential clients, should I use a public defender or a real lawyer? Public defenders in my sister's office won more cases than they lost; they are hard-working people and interested in their clients and in justice, not in money. It's a shame that this wasn't an important film, as it's a point that needs to be driven home.

Watching Hunt The Man Down put me in mind of a Law And Order episode where Mandy Patinkin had to be retried again after jumping bail some 20 years after the crime and Sam Waterston's problem was the same as Gig Young's, missing witnesses. Only Young is the public defender.James Anderson after years of hiding foils a robbery at a restaurant/bar where he was a dishwasher. That act of heroism cost him his freedom.Young is appointed to handle his new trial and he prevails on his retired cop father Harry Shannon to locate all the people who were witnesses. On the night in question Anderson fell in with a crowd of young 20 something yuppies as we would call them today. One of them is shot while he's sleeping and Anderson is the one who looks good for it.This group has gone up, down, and sideways on the social scale in the intervening years. One murder, and two attempts on other witnesses convince Young he's got an innocent client. In the end it's an act of kindly deception perpetrated on one of them that's the key to solving the case.Standing out in this film is Willard Parker as the blind veteran, once a rising star in business now a bookbinder. Lynne Roberts who believes in Anderson's innocence and Cleo Moore a brassy blond from the Veda Ann Borg school. Veda must have been busy because Cleo's playing her kind of part and she does well with it.Hunt The Man Down is a well made B film from RKO and it looks like a television pilot. I think that Young and Shannon in a series based on this film would have worked.

It amazes me when people dismiss a movie because of its short length. I much more appreciate a compact, well written and directed movie than some drivel that drags on and on and makes me wonder what happened to the editor. I watched this movie with low expectations since i had never heard of the director and most of the actors. Despite the number of central characters, the director did an excellent job of quickly defining them and getting to the point of the movie. Any additional footage would have been superfluous and only bogged down the steady pace of the movie. James Anderson was excellent at avoiding the stereotypical unjustly accused victim, he neither ranted about his predicament nor did he come across as the overly likable guy who just happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, which is what is normally expected of that type of roll. Though it's hard to imagine a public defender putting as much work into the case as this one did, i thought it was a great bit of writing to make his pivotal discovery an accident despite the pd's dogged pursuit of those involved 12 years earlier. I highly recommend this movie to those who appreciate tightly written and economically directed movies.

Low-budget murder mystery about a Public Defender trying to clear his client of a murder the man had been convicted of 12 years previously. Complicating things is the fact that he escaped custody after his conviction, but the PD believes the man to be innocent of the murder and works to find the real killer. Gig Young as the PD is okay, and James Anderson as the convicted killer is actually pretty good, but the picture as a whole just rambles along with little suspense, and despite some good character actors in the cast, the performances are generally below par. Director George Archainbaud was apparently more at home making westerns--he was churning out Gene Autry's TV series at Columbia at around this time--but even if he had tried to inject any liveliness into this picture, the hack script would have defeated his attempts. Average at best, the film climaxes with a courtroom scene that's straight out of an episode of "Perry Mason" and is just as predictable.