The Manhunt (original title: Cane arrabbiato) is a 1984 Italian/American action crime film, starring Ethan Wayne, Raimund Harmstorf, Henry Silva, Bo Sevenson and Ernest Borgnine.
A young man buys two horses at an Arizona race track and is riding them home across the land of a rancher named Robeson hen he stops to water them. Caught by Robeson and his men, the rancher takes the two horses from him. When he returns later to attempt to reclaim them, he's accused of stealing the two horses. Unable to prove ownership, the young man is then sentenced to prison where he's forced to do chain-gang type work. He escapes, is recaptured, and escapes again as he tries to locate the man who sold him the horses.
Tropes:
- Car Fu: During his second escape, Wayne's character uses a prison bus to ram open the gates of the prison, and then to run several of the pursuing cars off the road.
- Clothing Combat: The stranger swats one of Robeson's hands aside with his hat.
- Deadly Environment Prison: Ethan Wayne's cellmate tells him that the prison is surrounded by desert for 30 miles in every direction and that he will fry before he makes it out. Nevertheless, Wayne breaks out and makes it across the desert, with no indication of how he manages it.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: Several cars belonging to the Lemming Cops blow up for no readily apparent reason during the Car Chases.
- Free Wheel: After the police car of one of the Lemming Cops explodes for no reason during the second Car Chase, a wheel with a flaming tyre rolls past the camera.
- Karma Houdini: At the end of the film, Ethan Wayne gets his horses back, but none of the bad guys suffer any kind of punishment for their illegal actions: including Robeson, who stole the horses and perjured himself to send Wayne to prison; Forrest, who flogged him; and the warden, whose torturous treatment of Wayne in prison was blatantly illegal and could have killed him.
- Lawman Baton: The chief guard in the prison carries a baton that he uses to whack Ethan Wayne in the kidneys for any infraction of the rules, or even if there has been no infraction.
- Lemming Cops: In two different Car Chases, cops mindlessly pursue Ethan Wayne's character and wreck multiple police cars along the way.
- The Scrounger: Wayne's cellmate in prison seems able to get his hands on almost anything, including cigarettes, cigars, and whiskey.
- Side Bet: The warden and the chief guard have a $100 bet on whether Wayne's character will be able to run all the way from the work site to the prison without collapsing.
- A Taste of the Lash: After being caught on Robeson's ranch following his first escape, Forrest has the stranger strung up in the barn and administers a flogging to him before handing him over to the sheriff.
- Wardens Are Evil: The warden and chief guard at the prison are sadists who make Wayne's character run back from the chain gang worksite behind the warden's jeep, being followed by an Angry Guard Dog that will attack him if he falls too far behind the jeep.
- What Are You in For?: A variation in that someone else says what the prisoner is in for. When Ethan Wayne is first placed in the cell in prison, the cell's hard man Ford suspects he is a snitch planted by the guards. However, The Scrounger says that he isn't a snitch, but that he got one and half years for stealing two horses. When Ford demands to know how he knows that, the scrounger just says that he knows everything that goes on in the prison.
- Working on the Chain Gang: After being incarcerated, the stranger is put to work on a chain gang working on a bridge project.
- Wrongful Accusation Insurance: At the end of the film, Ethan Wayne's character is apparently free to go after proving he actually owned the horses he was accused of stealing, despite having twice escaped from prison, threatened the lives of Robeson and his men, been an accomplice to the attempted murder of a police officer, and caused massive property damage during the Car Chases as the authorities attempted to recapture him.
