Fate Is the Hunter

Fate Is the Hunter follows Sam McBane, an airline executive who cannot accept the official explanation for a crash. A passenger plane goes down shortly after taking off from Los Angeles, leaving a single flight attendant among the survivors, and the airline and investigators settle on pilot error, pointing to Captain Jack Savage, McBane's friend. McBane, who once flew as Savage's co-pilot before moving into management, begins looking into other possible causes instead of letting the matter close.

Ralph Nelson directed the film, which sits between Lilies of the Field and Father Goose in a run of features that began with Cinderella and Blood Money in 1957. Harold Medford wrote the screenplay, Aaron Rosenberg produced it, and Glenn Ford plays McBane, with Rod Taylor as Savage, Suzanne Pleshette as Martha Webster and Nancy Kwan as Sally Fraser. Jane Russell and Wally Cox also appear in a credited cast of eighty-five.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.8 from around 2,100 votes, while its TMDB rating stands at 6.5 from a much smaller number of votes. Those figures point to a film that has kept a modest but engaged audience over the decades rather than one that ever dominated discussion of early 1960s American drama.