User Reviews

"Man Hunt" stars the little-known Junior Durkin. In Durkin's case, he's pretty much unknown today because he tragically died in an auto accident at age 19.

Junior (Durkin) wants to be a detective and spends all his time reading detective stories. It's such a bad problem that he's lost job after job because he's ill-focused and keeps getting caught reading these stories on the job. Despite fancying himself as a budding private dick, he's also incredibly dim. This is because after meeting Josie Woodward, she's invited to her house for dinner. Junior recognizes that her father is the spitting image of a guy who stole some diamonds some time ago....he even makes a comment to this effect. But then, amazingly, he assumes it's all just a coincidence!!

While Junior is out on the porch canoodling with Josie, a stranger sneaks into her house. It's apparently her father's accomplice...the man who helped him steal the diamonds. And, he is demanding the father give the jewels to him. During this confrontation, the accomplice finds a torn up letter in the man's trash can...a letter to the police which confesses to the crime AND names his accomplice. Not surprisingly, this results in the accomplice killing Mr. Woodward. But because of this, the diamonds are still goodness knows where!

After the killing, the murderer approaches Junior and tells him he's Mr. Wilkie....a detective...though he has no proof of this and Junior just believes him! He also acts like a thug and seems very shady! For a time, Junior works with Wilkie, that is until Wilkie, out of the blue, attacks Junior's dog for no apparent reason...revealing that he's a violent brute.

Now at this point you have to wonder. First, Junior didn't connect the dots to realize that Woodward was the wanted man. Second, Wilkie is a sadistic and violent man who severely injures Junior's dog...but Junior doesn't go to the police even though he witnesses this attack. A normal teen would have gone to the cops or probably slugged the guy! Finally, he cannot keep a job or focus because he constantly reads detective stories...but apparently has learned nothing from them! Can any budding detective be THAT stupid?? And this brings me to the biggest problem with the film. Instead of the usual know-it-all teen (like Nancy Drew), this guy is really dim...too dim to be believable. Perhaps I might have felt differently had I seen this when I was a kid...but now I just found his character annoying and poorly written.

During the 1930s and 40s, Hollywood made thousands of films where amateur sleuths solve crimes. Among them, this is one of the weaker efforts. Not a terrible film but one with a very flawed script...one that so often makes little sense and most of it is due to how Junior was written. Perhaps a bit of a re-write could have saved this one.

Junior Scott is a teenager whose passion for detective stories has gotten him fired from every job in town. Luck is with him when a real-life detective story falls into his lap. A new neighbor, who happens to have a pretty daughter about his age, is murdered under mysterious circumstances. The dead man's secret is that he was a fugitive, framed for a jewel heist he didn't commit. The grown-up detective who comes to investigate agrees to let Junior help out, but the detective has sinister motives....

In the end, everything works out, but it's a hard one to watch. Maybe this movie was passable for it's day, but it's difficult to imagine now. The writers (including journeyman screenwriter Leonard Praskins) had some curious ideas about how detectives actually go about their job and the characters suffer from baffling lapses in judgment.

The film's main appear is historical. Junior Scott is played by Junior Durkin, whose eventual claim to fame was that two years later he was killed in a car wreck along with the father of Jackie 'Uncle Fester' Coogan. Junior's mother is a rare screen appearance from Dorothy Davenport, who was Wallace Reid's widow and star of the legendary lost silent film "Human Wreckage". Charlotte Henry, who plays the murdered man's daughter, would land on her feet after this turkey. Her next job was the title role in the 1933 version of 'Alice in Wonderland' with an all-star cast, including W.C. Fields, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper.

This movie was recently on TCM. Being a pre-code fan, I looked forward to seeing it. After I was finished watching it, I decided that the only characters I liked were Josie (Charlotte Henry), Mrs. Scott (Dorothy Davenport a/k/a Mrs. Wallace Reid), and Abraham Jones (Carl Gross). The other characters were just mean or plain stupid. I cringed when Junior called the African American kid "stupid" and made him cry. Then I cringed some more when he said that he wasn't crying because Junior called him stupid, but because he WAS stupid and not smart like Junior, who proves to be the stupidest character in the movie. Constantly getting fired from jobs, believing the criminal Wilke's story that he was from the treasury department makes him one dumb cluck in my book. Then law enforcement allowing him to question Josie for hours made the sheriff dumb and clueless until he redeems himself in the end.

Then there is animal abuse when Wilke throws Junior's dog into a wall, which made me as angry as calling the one of few likable characters "stupid". \

I know the movie was a product of its time, but give me a break. I can't picture anyone who saw this movie in the 30's rooting for Junior. Plus the story seemed a bit contrived and dragged in spots.

If you enjoy abuse of people of color, animal abuse and truly stupid characters who think they're the smartest person in the room. This movie is for you.

. . . for stoking the initial flames sparking the wild fires of racial unrest still raging through America's urban centers during these Troubled Times of 2020. Most everyone knows that cops with English, Swedish, Irish or German accents NEVER order food from even the drive-through lanes of fast food joints, since that often results in their grub being contaminated with substances ranging from spittle to botulism to rat poison. Though this fact of eatery sabotague has been documented in many films since MAN HUNT, the earlier picture was the first to alert the USA to these types of disgusting practices. "Abraham," who completely fits the demographic of all the subsequent police gunfire victims, is depicted here grossly slobbering over an upper-middle-class family's freshly-dried laundry order of white shirts and delicate lingerie. As the Good Book says, "What goes around comes around."