Cry of the Hunted

It’s almost impossible to describe Joseph H. Lewis’s Cry of the Hunted without resorting to its homoeroticism: two young, virile — and married — men (Barry Sullivan, Vittorio Gassman) beat each other up (twice), make up over a cigarette (twice), dream about each other, and get lost in a jungle together where they fight off alligators, quicksand, and infections, often looking at each other with barely repressed longing. Narratively speaking, Gassman is a Cajun prison escapee named Jory, and Sullivan is Lieutenant Tunner, the head of prison security whose mission is to find Jory and bring him home. The manhunt winds through trains, rivers, and boats to the Louisiana bayou, where Sullivan and his fellow security cop Goodwin (William Conrad) camp out in a swamp graveyard near an elderly woman calling out the name of her lover Raul who long ago turned into some kind of avian ghost. “Things can happen in that bayou,” Goodwin warns Tunner early in the film. They most certainly can.