THE MAN HUNTER (1972) – FORGOTTEN TELEVISION

THE MAN HUNTER (1972) – This made for tv movie should not be confused with the later Ken Howard series of the same name about a 1930s bounty hunter. This telefilm starred Roy Thinnes as David Farrow, a Big Game hunter who plies his trade in jungle locations around the world. Farrow is hired to track down a deadly Cajun criminal who has fled into the Louisiana bayous.

The venerable William “Big Bill” Smith plays Clel Bocock, a vicious but charismatic gangster who is a veritable Pretty Boy Floyd to the people of the bayous and is as much at home in the swamp as he is in the city.

The Man Hunter opens with Clel and his boys pulling off a bank robbery which misfires, with Clel killing the son of the bank owner in the resulting violence. When the cops lose Bocock in the swampland the bank owner, Walter Sinclair (David Brian), seeks outside help.

Viewers then join our title character on his latest safari, where we get to see David Farrow in action. After this most recent brush with death, Farrow is approached in Africa by the bank owner’s toady, Carl Auscher (Sorrell Booke as a combination of Boss Hogg and Wayland Smithers.).

Farrow at first turns down the offer of a huge bounty for hunting down Clel Bocock in the swamps, but like a Film Noir heavy Auscher makes it clear that he and his employer know about David’s precarious financial situation AND about a man he killed in the past back in America. To earn the money to keep his business afloat, Thinnes reluctantly accepts the job.

Farrow uneasily returns to his homeland after years of self-imposed exile overseas and finalizes his negotiations with the bank owner Sinclair. This is all reasonably interesting and is a nice variation on the usual hired gun/ private investigator scenario, so it feels a bit fresher than it really is.

Our hero poses as a reporter in Cajun Country, pretending to be writing a story to cement Clel Bocock’s legend as a Jesse James of the bayou. He tries to talk Clel’s suspicious parents and his sultry wife Mara into covertly arranging an interview with the fugitive.

The cagey trio pretend not to know where Clel is hiding, but before long his wife sneaks off to try to get word to Clel about the supposed reporter asking about him. Farrow was counting on both results and secretly follows Mara. 

Sandra Freaking Dee plays Mara Bocock, the tarty little temptress of a wife so well that you’ll never again feel the same way about the Grease song Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee. Mara tries to use her charms to manipulate our Man Hunter the same way she strings along the local males, some of whom are after the hidden loot from Clel’s latest heist.

One of those men is crooked lawyer Rafe Augustine, played by Albert Salmi. Rafe wants to get his hands on the stolen bearer bonds AND on Mara, which eventually puts him at odds with David Farrow.

Ultimately, a clash deep in the swamp results in Clel eluding David and fleeing to the big city. David traces him there, but Clel has the advantage over the jungle hunter in the sleazy back alleys of New Orleans.

The one and only Al Hirt makes an appearance as the owner of a criminal dive where another of Clel Bocock’s wives, Teresa Taylor (Madlyn Rhue) works as a singer.

SPOILERS:

Sorrell Booke’s character double-crosses his bank owner employer and wants to find Clel and split the loot with him. Sandra Dee and Roy Thinnes eventually end their bickering flirtation by oinking and boinking, and William Smith hunkers down in a cabin in the Sierra Nevadas.

The final fourth of The Man Hunter stalls and goes in too many directions at once. Plus there is an unintentionally funny gunfight in which – just so that Roy Thinnes as Farrow doesn’t have to kill someone – multiple bad guys accidentally shoot EACH OTHER while trading gunfire with David. It’s like a sudden dose of Inspector Clouseau and ruins the tension.

When David and Mara have Clel cornered, more gunfire results, with Sandra Dee trying to betray our hero into William Smith’s clutches. Thinnes survives and, exorcising the demons of his past over his long ago slaying in self defense, brings in his outlaw quarry alive. 

As stated above, The Man Hunter is three-fourths of a good story, but then things slow to a crawl for too long before the tense finale. You could do worse than watch this example of 1970s telefilms, but it’s not a must-see production.

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