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.
