Hunt down lots of people

Tomorrow is the birth anniversary of actor Gig Young, so TCM is running several of his movies. One that's not seen very often is Hunt the Man Down, which will be airing at 7:45 AM.

Bill Jackson (James Anderson) works at a bar in Salinas, CA, together with Sally (Lynne Roberts), who holds a flame for him even though he seems reluctant to reciprocate. One night after closing, she's tallying up the receipts when an assailant comes in. Bill stops the would-be robbery, which ought to make him a hero, except that he's a rather reluctant hero, not even wanting his picture in the paper.

There's a good reason for that. An assistant DA down in Los Angeles shows his boss a coupy of the paper with the candid shot Bill didn't want taken, and the DA eventually recognizes Bill as Richard Kincaid, whom the DA had prosecuted for murder a dozen years earlier. Kincaid took an opportunity to escape since he knew there was no way the jury was going to acquit him what with the way the evidence was stacked against him. He's finally been found, and the DA is determined to get a conviction this time.

Kincaid has no money, so he's assigned a lawyer from the public defender's office, one Paul Bennett (Gig Young). Kincaid tells the story of the case. He was at a bar one night when he accidentally spilled his drink on a woman. That led to her party inviting him over to their table, which led to his going up to her apartment with them for a party. However, she's married, and when the husband shows up, he's pissed, thinking Kincaid is the woman's lover. The husband was shot, and naturally Kincaid is prosecuted.

The obvious thing to do is to look for all the witnesses. Technically, the DA's office is supposed to do this too, but they've already got the testimony from the previous trial. There were three couples plus the wife of the murder victim, and pretty much everybody seems to have disappeared, except for college football star "Brick" Appleby (Willard Parker). On interviewing him, Paul finds that he was drafted and blinded in World War II, and that his fiancée who was at that party died while he was in the hospital recovering.

So Paul and his retired cop father Wallace (Harry Shannon) go to skid row to see if they can get information from the stool pigeon drunks who hang out there. This leads them to "Lefty" McGuire (John Kellogg), who had been a ladies' man but is now an inveterate drunk. He was married to Alice (Mary Anderson) at the time, but they're divorced now.

Lefty takes a powder after this meeting, and when Wallace finds him again, Wallace finds a couple of thugs trailing him, eventually shooting at him and Lefty! And then some thug finds where Alice lives and tries to beat her to death too! Will Paul be able to find all the witness and piece together what really happened?

Hunt the Man Down is a B movie with noirish elements. Other than Gig Young, the cast is chock full of supporting actors, but it's something that works well for a movie like this which is decidedly about the less glamorous side of life. Everything about the movie says competently made but never rising to greatness. There's nothing wrong with that, except that in a few short years with the rise of TV something like this would probably have become an episode of Perry Mason or one of the many lawyer or detective shows.

I think anybody who likes noir or wants an hour of solid if unspectacular entertainment will enjoy Hunt the Man Down. It doesn't seem to be on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the rare TCM showing (I think the last time it ran was for Gig Young's birthday back in 2015).