Towards the end of 1955’s Track the Man Down, almost all the main characters are in a boathouse, either dozing or simply bored out of their minds. I can identify with them, as I had long since checked out while watching this.
One major problem is there are too many of those characters and each is poorly defined. I don’t feel like providing names of either the actors or the role they’re in, since you have only seen a couple of these people in anything before. Instead, this is basically what you will find: a newspaper reporter, a handful of criminals, a woman in love with one of those criminals, that woman’s sister, a haughty actress who just left a successful stage production in mid-run, her flustered agent, a perpetual drunk, a mother with a young son and infant daughter, and a country doctor. Just imagine all but a couple of these people whiling away the hours in a darkened boathouse.
Among the faces and/or names you might recognize are Petula Clark as the sister I mentioned in the preceding paragraph. When I saw her name second-billed in the opening credits, I thought this couldn’t possibly be the singer of “Downtown”, and yet it was. I also recognized Kenneth Griffith as one of the criminals, but only because I have seen an unusually large quantity of old British movies for somebody who has never been to the isles.
There are also a couple of faces I didn’t recognize, and those belong to leading men Kent Taylor and George Rose. The story really centers around Rose, as this thug has the loot from the dog track robbery which kicks off the picture. Now he’s trying to leave the country and is pursued by both the police and his criminal partners in that venture.
Taylor is a newspaper man who wants to follow the story of the robbery, but is instead stuck doing a profile of that mercurial actress who left the stage unexpectedly.
Taylor will be among that sad lot in the boathouse all because Clark, while avoiding the criminals, ducked into a phone booth he was using at the time. Intrigued by her, and eventually seeing an in-road to continue to cover the robbery, he stays by her side. A preposterously convenient bus ride gathers together those two, Rose, Griffith, and almost all of the other characters.
The bus contrivance is a good example of how so much is wrong with this film. Many of the characters will board this bus without any apparent incentive or rationale for doing so. They are simply on it because the plot demands they do so. This is not dissimilar to that young mother’s baby, who will spontaneously become sick when the plot requires it. I was not in the least surprised when, after the crisis is over, that infant is just as suddenly no longer ill.
I haven’t even addressed the drunk elephant in the room. Why is it so hard for people to convincingly play the deeply inebriated? I’m starting to think Andy Kaufman was onto something when he refused to play high in that notorious sketch on the TV show Fridays. I’m not going to do the research to learn which actor plays the drunk here, but he is deeply annoying and funny exactly zero times.
Track the Man Down is the kind of the film that, when somebody says they don’t make them like that anymore, you might think that’s not a terrible thing. What should have been a very straight-forward affair is pointlessly junked up with additional subplots and characters. This is a film with too much bloat, leaving it like how I imagine that perpetually drunk guy will look some day.
Dir: R.G. Springsteen
Starring Kent Taylor, Petula Clark, George Rose
Watched on Olive Films blu-ray