After wandering around a carnival in a fugue state Philip Armstrong (Myron Healey) consults Dr. Robert Ordway (Warner Baxter) for help. Armstrong tells Ordway that his name is John Foster and gives him a bogus address. Armstrong is an ex-serviceman who was diagnosed as having combat fatigue and shell shock, or PTSD. He has been having these losses of memory for a while. He tells Ordway that he is engaged and doesn’t want his fiancé, Irene Cotter (Ellen Drew) to know that he has a problem.
After he leaves Irene shows up looking for information, but Ordway maintains his patient confidentiality and won’t tell her anything. What he does is follow the path that Armstrong did and visits the carnival and the streets that Armstrong said he had been on. While visiting the area he sees two men carrying another man to a car. Pretending to be drunk and looking for a match he gets close to the men. He sees that the third man is Armstrong and he has a bullet wound in his head. When he is able, he calls Inspector Harry Manning (William Frawley) at the police department and reports the murder.
The police find nothing except an old, abandoned house that ends up belonging to the Cotter family. It’s not until sometime later that Armstrong’s body is actually found. Through his investigation Ordway finds out that Armstrong’s fiancé Irene has a sister named Natalie that has been estranged from the family for years. Ordway is wondering if Natalie has anything to do with Armstrong’s death. Things get a little murky when the men who were disposing of Armstrong’s body also turn up dead.
“The Crime Doctor’s Manhunt” AKA “The Crime Doctor’s Honor” was released in 1946 and was directed by William Castle. It is a crime mystery and the third Crime Doctor film that Castle directed. The film is also the seventh of ten films in the Crime Doctor series.
At only an hour long, the movie crams a lot of stuff into it. As with most of the Crime Doctor films, the title has nothing to do with the movie, and the movie is a little on the quirky side. The plot of the film, again, as with most of the Crime Doctor films, starts out leading in one direction but then morphs into something else. The direction this film goes in is, for the most part, obvious, but it was an interesting ride. Castle does a good job of directing everyone down the rabbit hole.
The film boasts a very young Myron Healey as Philip Armstrong as well as William Frawley as Inspector Manning. Frawley is best known as Fred Mertz on the “I Love Lucy” television program.
If you look on IMDb the cast lists and uncredited Harry Morgan as a character named Jervis. The photograph is of Harry Morgan the actor that appeared as Colonel Potter in the television series M*A*S*H*. I believe the photograph is of the wrong person. There is an actor named Harry Hays Morgan who did a lot of bit parts in films from 1943 to 1948. He appears to be the Cotter family butler. It seems that IMDb has the wrong credit, and it should be for Harry Hays Morgan and not Harry Morgan.