The main shortcoming of Hunt The Man Down is that it's too short. It tells the attempt to exonerate a man of a crime committed a dozen years earlier, half a dozen eye-witnesses to which have long since scattered. That's a lot a backstory to cram into a scant 68 minutes programmer length when the plot to unfurl is almost as complicated as The Killing or Out of the Past. Despite some nicely observed detail, ranging from Los Angeles' Skid Row to Beverly Hills estates where maids stand by swimming pools with towels on their arm, the many characters don't get their due Hunt The Man Down becomes less complex than confusing.
James Anderson, working as a dishwasher in a bar that's held up after hours, shoots and kills the intruder; in the resultant publicity, he's spotted as the man who went on the lam before being sentenced for murder some years before. It falls to the public defender (Gig Young) to prove his innocence. With the help of his father, a one-armed retired cop (Harry Shannon), he tries to locate the guests at the impromptu drinking party in 1938 which (as such shindigs so often do) ended in the violent death of one of the merry-makers. He finds the original witnesses elusive, dissembling, deranged or dead. He also finds that, once a habit for homicide takes hold, it's hard to break....
Though Young looks, well, young, he was 37 at the time, with close to two dozen movies behind him. He's still far and away the best-known member of the cast, with the exception of Iris Adrian (as a streel) and Cleo Moore (who shows up for the concluding courtroom scene in a knock-em-dead black number, topped off by the sort of hat worn only by floozies in witness boxes). The movie could have used more of her, and of Adrian. For that matter, it could have used more of just about everything.
