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You wouldn't think a simple thing like that would ruin a man's life, would you?
Hunt the Man Down (1951) may never rank among the secret gems of B-noir, but it catches some light all the same. It gets at its post-war disillusion from an unusual angle; it knows the world is clear-cut only to cursory view. The title once again bears only the most anamorphic resemblance to the story, but it just had to look good on the bottom half of the bill.
The premise proceeds from an irony O. Henry would have understood: the wages of heroism are a kick in the teeth when the publicity accrued by a reclusive dishwasher for foiling a stickup at a no-frills watering hole in Salinas unmasks him as a murder suspect who ran out on his own trial a dozen years ago in Los Angeles. Assigned a public defender who doesn't credit his innocence any more than did the jury the first time around, all he can offer is the same story he told in 1938, about the party of nice young strangers who invited him back for drinks and to a one testified against him after the jealous husband who pulled a gun on him and knocked him down—and whom he was hot-headed enough to threaten in return—was found shot in bed with the self-same gun and only their two sets of fingerprints on it. He has no missed evidence, no unexplored leads, no faith in the system he's been hiding from for years. He turns back as the guard leads him out, almost challengingly: "As I said before, gentlemen—I hope I don't mar your record."
I like James Anderson so much as Bill Jackson né Dick Kincaid that even knowing it would have required an entirely different form of movie, I regret a little that he can't be the protagonist. The actor may be most readily recognized nowadays as Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), but in his first credited role he has a clever face for a character whose guilt or innocence forms the cornerstone of the cold-case plot: narrow and tight-eyed, easily lent to sarcasm or suspicion; no matter the sincerity of his statements, it would have told against him at his trial as much as the seamlessly circumstantial evidence. His feelings for the co-worker played by Lynne Roberts are established almost entirely by the duet they share right before the fateful arrival of the "Paper Bag Bandit," but it works as it would in a musical, because she can draw out his long-forgone skill at the piano and match it with her own wistful rendition of "Wishing Will Make It So." They glow so unstoppably at one another across the divider of a prison visiting room that we want to be rewarded by their happy ending. We still can't tell if his wariness is honestly come by or concealing an unpleasant surprise and neither can Gig Young's Paul Bennett, the court-appointed defense counsel doing his own legwork because all two of his office's investigators are occupied with other cases. It tempers what otherwise risks feeling like a hard sell for the California criminal justice system, as does Paul's eventual team-up with his one-armed ex-cop of a father—Harry Shannon's Wallace Bennett has a jaundiced view of his son's vocation along with the veteran street smarts to ferret out scattered witnesses, but his own former profession makes for something of a liability when it comes to conducting interviews down on Skid Row. "I'm sorry, Mr. Bennett," a flophouse pool player reassures the amused lawyer, "I know you can't help it who your old man is." There were four couples at the fatal party, seven witnesses at the trial of Richard Kincaid: a tight-knit friend group since blown apart. With more than a decade and a war intervening, it's not shocking that it takes more than the telephone book to track them down, but with only a week's continuation on the case, it's not optimal, either, even before Bennett père et fils find themselves up against some unforeseen dead ends and an even less anticipated drive-by shooting. "Come on, Pop, we need a hunch! What am I not paying you for?"
The procedural nature of this plot leaves Hunt the Man Down on the debatable line between a regular crime picture and full-fledged film noir, but its results constitute a surprisingly decent argument in support of the latter. Dick has spent the last twelve years in a variety of menial, migrant jobs under as many names, keeping his head down and moving on whenever he got too accustomed to his life—he admits to Roberts' Sally Clark that he stayed too long in Salinas because he couldn't make himself walk out on her—but as the narrative round-robins from each rediscovered witness to the next, it becomes ever more apparent that everyone's lives have unraveled since 1938. "It was a nice young crowd," Dick recalled them, "clean-cut, attractive." We saw them through his eyes, the effervescent salesman doting on his sweet-faced wife, the sensitive couple who always seemed to be waltzing no matter the music, the more vivacious pair still gilded with varsity glory. If anything, he seemed the odd man out in their bright company, the solitary, not yet successful musician watching with his drink from the sidelines and about to ask a married woman for an ill-fated dance. By the time the Bennetts catch up with them, every one of these relationships has failed, once-fast friends have lost track of one another in the trauma of war, the personal demons of alcoholism and mental illness or just plain death. It isn't as stacked a deck as a TPK. The blinded veteran has reinvented himself as a bookbinder and it's rather charming in 1950 that he's introduced cooking himself a curry for dinner; the wife divorced after a long illness honestly seems to have traded up to assist a marionette show inspired by the Turnabout Theatre. But the wreckage is real, even in the lives of the seeming success story, the affluent couple who stand off Paul's questions beside their butler-patrolled pool as though it is not just beneath them to get mixed up again in a murder but petrifying. "What's that quotation? 'Times change, and we change with them.' Especially the witnesses in this case." Not once does the film imply that all these misfortunes can be traced to the tragedy of the murder or even the sea-change of the war. As more than one noir has observed before now, even in the buoyant optimism of the American dream, sometimes people's lives just don't work out.
While it escalates into more conventionally criminal territory with a mysterious pair of attacks on witnesses and the introduction of a polite racketeer played by Paul Frees, the film's strongest argument for itself as noir comes domestically at the denouement. As we learn in a climactic cross-examination so beloved of courtroom dramas, Dan Brian was murdered by his jilted one-time fiancée, who took the opportunity of the gun that Dick had tossed onto the bed among everyone's coats—never imagining he would need to account for it until it was too late to be believed—to wait for the guests to go home and then even the score. Behind the clean-cut attractive niceness that Dick smiled at over his drink that Saturday night were secrets and betrayals at work, motives not only for murder but for the disintegrations that would follow, habits and attractions in embryo and occluded not only from the unknowing stranger but from the knowledge of the group itself. The nightmare truth of noir is not that everything's rotten, but that nothing's sure. It can't be known. It changes shape. It's cosmically random: one night in a bar, a drink spilled on a girl's sleeve smashes the life of Richard Kincaid; twelve years later, a pistol pulled by a small-time hood starts the process of putting it back together. "If I'd picked any other place," he says at the start of his story, "none of this would have happened," but of what in creation's colliding universe isn't that true? If your grandma had wheels, she'd be a wagon. I do not love the device of the mentally ill woman employed as a specter of guilt, especially not when she lurches up the aisle like a revenant and then laughs so shrilly as to surrender to every madhouse cliché, but it fits the disinterring themes of the third act, a crucial clue in a cemetery, the resurrection of the one witness who can reveal the truth galvanized by the memoryless nekyia of another. Dick isn't just saved from a death in San Quentin, he's given back the life he hasn't been living. It even has a girl in it this time. Paul said it: "The prosecutor has told you that history repeats itself. But history never repeats itself exactly."
I discovered this picture originally in December when I was in no condition to do anything about it; I am grateful to TCM's Noir Alley for bringing it around again. It seems to be on YouTube at an endurable pitch of generation loss. I don't have much feeling for the direction by George Archainbaud, but Nicholas Musuraca had charge of the cinematography and it looks especially good—and especially noir—after hours at Happy's Place and day-washed on Cahuenga Boulevard. The screenplay by DeVallon Scott has room for the fairness of Paul's admission, "Strictly between you and me, Pop, there are times I'm sure he's guilty. But I also know this—if he was rich, he'd have the biggest lawyers in town working for him," and also down-and-out zingers like "I've drunk better alcohol out of compasses." I don't know what to make of the fact that James and Mary Anderson were cast as unrelated characters when they share such a family resemblance, but perhaps it was thought that her glasses would disguise it. In the era of Howard Hughes, I appreciate even a modest programmer making it out of the gate at RKO and Hunt the Man Down even gets somewhere afterward. This record brought to you by my clean-cut backers at Patreon.
The premise proceeds from an irony O. Henry would have understood: the wages of heroism are a kick in the teeth when the publicity accrued by a reclusive dishwasher for foiling a stickup at a no-frills watering hole in Salinas unmasks him as a murder suspect who ran out on his own trial a dozen years ago in Los Angeles. Assigned a public defender who doesn't credit his innocence any more than did the jury the first time around, all he can offer is the same story he told in 1938, about the party of nice young strangers who invited him back for drinks and to a one testified against him after the jealous husband who pulled a gun on him and knocked him down—and whom he was hot-headed enough to threaten in return—was found shot in bed with the self-same gun and only their two sets of fingerprints on it. He has no missed evidence, no unexplored leads, no faith in the system he's been hiding from for years. He turns back as the guard leads him out, almost challengingly: "As I said before, gentlemen—I hope I don't mar your record."
I like James Anderson so much as Bill Jackson né Dick Kincaid that even knowing it would have required an entirely different form of movie, I regret a little that he can't be the protagonist. The actor may be most readily recognized nowadays as Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), but in his first credited role he has a clever face for a character whose guilt or innocence forms the cornerstone of the cold-case plot: narrow and tight-eyed, easily lent to sarcasm or suspicion; no matter the sincerity of his statements, it would have told against him at his trial as much as the seamlessly circumstantial evidence. His feelings for the co-worker played by Lynne Roberts are established almost entirely by the duet they share right before the fateful arrival of the "Paper Bag Bandit," but it works as it would in a musical, because she can draw out his long-forgone skill at the piano and match it with her own wistful rendition of "Wishing Will Make It So." They glow so unstoppably at one another across the divider of a prison visiting room that we want to be rewarded by their happy ending. We still can't tell if his wariness is honestly come by or concealing an unpleasant surprise and neither can Gig Young's Paul Bennett, the court-appointed defense counsel doing his own legwork because all two of his office's investigators are occupied with other cases. It tempers what otherwise risks feeling like a hard sell for the California criminal justice system, as does Paul's eventual team-up with his one-armed ex-cop of a father—Harry Shannon's Wallace Bennett has a jaundiced view of his son's vocation along with the veteran street smarts to ferret out scattered witnesses, but his own former profession makes for something of a liability when it comes to conducting interviews down on Skid Row. "I'm sorry, Mr. Bennett," a flophouse pool player reassures the amused lawyer, "I know you can't help it who your old man is." There were four couples at the fatal party, seven witnesses at the trial of Richard Kincaid: a tight-knit friend group since blown apart. With more than a decade and a war intervening, it's not shocking that it takes more than the telephone book to track them down, but with only a week's continuation on the case, it's not optimal, either, even before Bennett père et fils find themselves up against some unforeseen dead ends and an even less anticipated drive-by shooting. "Come on, Pop, we need a hunch! What am I not paying you for?"
The procedural nature of this plot leaves Hunt the Man Down on the debatable line between a regular crime picture and full-fledged film noir, but its results constitute a surprisingly decent argument in support of the latter. Dick has spent the last twelve years in a variety of menial, migrant jobs under as many names, keeping his head down and moving on whenever he got too accustomed to his life—he admits to Roberts' Sally Clark that he stayed too long in Salinas because he couldn't make himself walk out on her—but as the narrative round-robins from each rediscovered witness to the next, it becomes ever more apparent that everyone's lives have unraveled since 1938. "It was a nice young crowd," Dick recalled them, "clean-cut, attractive." We saw them through his eyes, the effervescent salesman doting on his sweet-faced wife, the sensitive couple who always seemed to be waltzing no matter the music, the more vivacious pair still gilded with varsity glory. If anything, he seemed the odd man out in their bright company, the solitary, not yet successful musician watching with his drink from the sidelines and about to ask a married woman for an ill-fated dance. By the time the Bennetts catch up with them, every one of these relationships has failed, once-fast friends have lost track of one another in the trauma of war, the personal demons of alcoholism and mental illness or just plain death. It isn't as stacked a deck as a TPK. The blinded veteran has reinvented himself as a bookbinder and it's rather charming in 1950 that he's introduced cooking himself a curry for dinner; the wife divorced after a long illness honestly seems to have traded up to assist a marionette show inspired by the Turnabout Theatre. But the wreckage is real, even in the lives of the seeming success story, the affluent couple who stand off Paul's questions beside their butler-patrolled pool as though it is not just beneath them to get mixed up again in a murder but petrifying. "What's that quotation? 'Times change, and we change with them.' Especially the witnesses in this case." Not once does the film imply that all these misfortunes can be traced to the tragedy of the murder or even the sea-change of the war. As more than one noir has observed before now, even in the buoyant optimism of the American dream, sometimes people's lives just don't work out.
While it escalates into more conventionally criminal territory with a mysterious pair of attacks on witnesses and the introduction of a polite racketeer played by Paul Frees, the film's strongest argument for itself as noir comes domestically at the denouement. As we learn in a climactic cross-examination so beloved of courtroom dramas, Dan Brian was murdered by his jilted one-time fiancée, who took the opportunity of the gun that Dick had tossed onto the bed among everyone's coats—never imagining he would need to account for it until it was too late to be believed—to wait for the guests to go home and then even the score. Behind the clean-cut attractive niceness that Dick smiled at over his drink that Saturday night were secrets and betrayals at work, motives not only for murder but for the disintegrations that would follow, habits and attractions in embryo and occluded not only from the unknowing stranger but from the knowledge of the group itself. The nightmare truth of noir is not that everything's rotten, but that nothing's sure. It can't be known. It changes shape. It's cosmically random: one night in a bar, a drink spilled on a girl's sleeve smashes the life of Richard Kincaid; twelve years later, a pistol pulled by a small-time hood starts the process of putting it back together. "If I'd picked any other place," he says at the start of his story, "none of this would have happened," but of what in creation's colliding universe isn't that true? If your grandma had wheels, she'd be a wagon. I do not love the device of the mentally ill woman employed as a specter of guilt, especially not when she lurches up the aisle like a revenant and then laughs so shrilly as to surrender to every madhouse cliché, but it fits the disinterring themes of the third act, a crucial clue in a cemetery, the resurrection of the one witness who can reveal the truth galvanized by the memoryless nekyia of another. Dick isn't just saved from a death in San Quentin, he's given back the life he hasn't been living. It even has a girl in it this time. Paul said it: "The prosecutor has told you that history repeats itself. But history never repeats itself exactly."
I discovered this picture originally in December when I was in no condition to do anything about it; I am grateful to TCM's Noir Alley for bringing it around again. It seems to be on YouTube at an endurable pitch of generation loss. I don't have much feeling for the direction by George Archainbaud, but Nicholas Musuraca had charge of the cinematography and it looks especially good—and especially noir—after hours at Happy's Place and day-washed on Cahuenga Boulevard. The screenplay by DeVallon Scott has room for the fairness of Paul's admission, "Strictly between you and me, Pop, there are times I'm sure he's guilty. But I also know this—if he was rich, he'd have the biggest lawyers in town working for him," and also down-and-out zingers like "I've drunk better alcohol out of compasses." I don't know what to make of the fact that James and Mary Anderson were cast as unrelated characters when they share such a family resemblance, but perhaps it was thought that her glasses would disguise it. In the era of Howard Hughes, I appreciate even a modest programmer making it out of the gate at RKO and Hunt the Man Down even gets somewhere afterward. This record brought to you by my clean-cut backers at Patreon.
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You will note that I wildly avoided describing all eight people from the party or we could have been here all night!
(Plus, bonus Cahuenga Blvd!)
Is it part of your local landscape like Glendale?
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Very much so!
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Nice!
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Your sentences! They have carried me right to YouTube to have some pictures to put to your words. Your description of Kincaid is perfect.
Though I was hoping for a conspiracy of couples and it sounds like there isn't one?
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Thank you! That really makes me happy.
Though I was hoping for a conspiracy of couples and it sounds like there isn't one?
Alas, no, although I actually like that it isn't a case of the group consenting to a scapegoat, it's just that six out of seven are all too ready to accept that the crime must have been committed by the stranger and the seventh conveniently keeps her mouth shut. Between the triangle of the jilting and the post-mortem indications of infidelity in both of the marriages, however, there was a decent amount of drama going on, even without the incipient alcoholism and breakdowns. Dick just wasn't equipped to detect it and, since his flashback was all we had to go on, neither were we.
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I agree -- it's a wonderful premise. This seems like a film that could be remade with great success, as its edges are a little ragged, but the structure is fascinating and can yield so much -- intrigue, insight, irony.
And it was short, heh. Really economical.
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What a neat idea. Very few movies from this era are remade to my knowledge unless they were big deals (in which case the remakes may be incessant). Who would you cast?
And it was short, heh. Really economical.
I unironically enjoy just how much plot B-movies and pre-Codes can pack into their runtimes.
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Thanks for that rabbit hole.
I don't really know many actors, though, so I'm a bit disappointing when it comes to particulars. (Like all I've come up with is: Nick Offerman somewhere?)
(Who would you say are the looming noir presences of our time?)
Something I liked about this film was that -- to my inexpert eye at least -- the actors aren't quite cast to type. (And the wigs were peculiar.)
So I like the idea of Hitchcockian off-casting it, making the visual presentation of the characters fit oddly from the start.
Maybe find some way of hearkening back to the 80s ensemble cast coming-of-age films so that the breakdown feels extra fragmenty. But I don't really know what I mean by that. (I haven't slept a great deal.)
Another kind of obvious thing to do might be to work with the dynamics of the bright young things vs. the guy they pick up for the evening -- heighten divisions / dynamics of class or race, for example. Make the place and time more particular perhaps.
Or what happens if this is a group of queer folks? People whose bonds feel extra threatened by societal forces?
Do you have any thoughts?
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You're welcome!
(Who would you say are the looming noir presences of our time?)
I don't know. I am badly out of the loop on contemporary films, including several intriguing-sounding neo-noirs that the advent of a plague prevented me from seeing. John Hawkes was the last actor to cross my radar in that fashion and I don't see an obvious part for him here, unless as the partial red herring of the racketeer. Nick Offerman, however, since you suggested him, would be a great investigative dad. I would want someone for the public defender who could be interesting to watch even when their role is mostly a detecting lens: an actor who isn't transparent prose.
Something I liked about this film was that -- to my inexpert eye at least -- the actors aren't quite cast to type. (And the wigs were peculiar.)
The wigs may have been RKO's budget, but I agree with you about the off-type casting, which is often visible in B-movies and something I really like about them. It's how actors generally deemed too weird to carry an A-picture end up in the spotlight; it can produce terrific results. (Many of my favorite actors from this period were deemed too weird to carry A-pictures.)
Do you have any thoughts?
Not independently, but I am greatly enjoying yours. I like the idea of doing more with the friend group, both by way of contrast with the outsider and among themselves; establishing a longer shared history so that the splintering after the murder comes as even more of a shock; even with an obvious suspect immediately in view, were they never sure about one another again? The class angle is present in the original film, could be pushed harder. I am also very tired. Making everyone more people sounds like the direction you're thinking in and I always approve of that.
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It starts to sound like something that might be fun to write, though you'd think I had my fill of swirling ensemble casts.
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Maybe it's your natural mode.
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Other thing I looked up: Nekiya--also cool! And relevant for the current Tale of the Polity, so thank for that too. (You're the locus classicus for that entire world, so really the thanks are Quite Large.)
One thing I didn't have the confidence that Google in its current incarnation would reveal for me was the meaning of TPK in It isn't as stacked a deck as a TPK. What does it mean?
Since this movie is on Youtube, I may check it out when I get back. Thanks for always sharing such interesting cinema!
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I hadn't seen that page! I like the bus and bicycle variants. Bus may be funnier than wagon.
(The shape-changing of noir is so important to me.)
Other thing I looked up: Nekiya--also cool! And relevant for the current Tale of the Polity, so thank for that too. (You're the locus classicus for that entire world, so really the thanks are Quite Large.)
You're welcome, but I still feel I'm the one making out like a bandit here. I can't wait to see the current relevance.
One thing I didn't have the confidence that Google in its current incarnation would reveal for me was the meaning of TPK in It isn't as stacked a deck as a TPK. What does it mean?
I'm sorry! It's a gaming term: it's short for “total party kill," i.e. all player characters kaput. Which the film does not inflict on its seven witnesses; it doesn't stretch credulity by giving them nothing but unrelieved tragedy. But they do all get damaged, and some by consequence of others, which fell within bounds of sad but plausible to me.
Since this movie is on Youtube, I may check it out when I get back. Thanks for always sharing such interesting cinema!
You're welcome! I hope you enjoy it when you get the chance! Travel safe in the meanwhile!
total party kill