One of my favorite meals I can remember was at a suburban Thai restaurant where the power was out at the time. Their kitchen was gas, so they could still cook. As long as you had cash, they would serve you. We sat there and ate in the light breeze flowing through the space from the front and back doors being propped open. The only light in the place was what little reflected off the blacktop and cars outside. It is hard to explain exactly how this moment felt, but it seemed we were outside of time and place, briefly occupying somewhere “other.” Not somewhere outside the US, but somehow outside of everything.
I mention this because there is a beautiful scene in 1963’s The Running Man where the three main characters (Laurence Harvey, Lee Remick and Alan Bates) have a casual conversation at night in the plaza outside a shabby hotel in Spain. This scene has a similar vibe to it, a feeling we are outside of time and space. I suspect most people would find this scene unnecessary, but it was the soul of the movie for me.
Harvey plays a man who fakes his death in a glider crash. I was surprised a glider was used and not a plane. Maybe gliding was a popular trend at the time this movie was made. All I know is I heartily agree with a statement about the hobby that some guy makes at the airport Harvey departs from: “It is dead set against our materialistic civilization. You can’t imagine anybody doing it for money.”
I’d say that is the truth, unless your goal is to commit insurance fraud, like Harvey is doing. After his funeral, he sneaks back into his apartment to have a brief liaison with his co-conspirator and wife, played by Remick. Their conversation is interrupted when a representative from the insurer (played by Bates) stops by.
The insurance company doesn’t investigate further, and Remick stays behind for a while to collect the payout while her husband sneaks off to France. He conveniently adopts a new identity when an Australian sheep farmer he meets in a bar accidentally leaves his passport behind.
Remick is less than thrilled with this new persona once she catches up with him. It doesn’t help he has been staying in a mansion as the guest of a woman who obviously has designs on him. Even worse, he has become a boor and does bourgeois things like belittling waiters. Hey, I think I have a new word: “boorgeois”.
The action then moves to Spain, which is where Bates catches Remick at a table at an outdoor café. He just happened to miss the departing Harvey by seconds. Bates says he is on holiday, but is he really? What if it is just a ruse to investigate the claim?
If Bates isn’t still working the case, it is odd how many insightful questions he asks. Much of what he says is highly ambiguous, and Bates delivers the best performance here, in a role that walks a razor-thin line.
About those questions, the script is fully of clever lines. Possibly a hair too clever, but it is how I wish people talked in real life. “How many sheep do you have?” “I don’t know. I only count them when I’m trying to go to sleep.” Remick, in particular, gets some of the more interesting lines, such as this prescient observation: “Why do people always get so angry in cars?” Or how she demures when Bates says he has something he has to tell her: “Whenever somebody says ‘I’ve got something I just have to say’, I don’t know, but I never want to hear it.”
That dialogue isn’t quite up to par with director Carol Reed’s most famous movie, The Third Man, which just happens to be my favorite film of all time. Still, there’s enough of that magic in The Running Man to be of interest or fans of that picture, as well as other thrillers. There may not be enough action to satisfy some people, but this is a good movie for those who can see the beauty in small moments and in lines of the type you wish you had ever thought to say.
Dir: Carol Reed
Starring Laurence Harvey, Lee Remick, Alan Bates
Watched on Arrow blu-ray