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.

( It's been nice meeting most of you. )

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.