A Gunman Has Escaped

A GUNMAN HAS ESCAPED is a low budget British crime thriller released in the postwar years. The darker-than-dark subject matter may have been offputting to the jaded, war weary audiences of the time, although it's held up well for modern viewers. There are no familiar faces in the cast here, making this something of a real obscurity.

The storyline is a simple one about a trio of crooks hiding out at a farmhouse. They're already the subject of a manhunt by police thanks to their murdering of a passer-by during the robbery, but the intervention of family members at the farm leads to the group falling out, somewhat inevitably. The storyline is completely predictable, but the script keeps you focused on the action, and I notice that future director John Gilling had a hand in it. The ending is fun.

Written by later British horror movie regular John Gilling, A Gunman Has Escaped is a tatty time-waster dating from 1948, though technically it certainly feels as though it was made significantly earlier than that. Obviously 'inspired' by such films as Odd Man Out and Brighton Rock (both 1947), it is a real oddity in that the cast seems to lack any recognisable faces, the story is essentially devoid of incident, and the acting comes across as real repertory theatre-standard stuff. Lead John Harvey gives a music hall-style impersonation of a 'cockney geezer' as a thuggish crook who accidentally shoots a member of the public during a robbery, and has to go on the run with a pair of accomplices; fleeing to the countryside 'somewhere up north', the trio's cover is blown by a salt-of-the-earth farmer in record time (mainly down to the fact that they seem to try and behave as shiftily as possible), before Harvey's moronic ringleader heads back to London for a showdown with the gang boss he thinks has grassed him up...

I didn't recognise Harvey at all when I was watching the movie, though a quick glance at his filmography shows that he actually had minor parts in Hitchcock thrillers (Stage Fright), Hammer flicks (X the Unknown, The Satanic Rites of Dracula), comedies (Private's Progress, Double Bunk), and a whole host of UK TV shows in a career lasting over forty years. Though not helped here by the somewhat dodgy editing and ropey sound quality, his performance certainly feels artificial (I'm no expert, but I'm certain murderous London gangsters wouldn't have been any more likely to use the word 'perisher' in 1948 as they are in 2016), and it is by no means the worst or most incongruous one in the picture. As posh boy army deserter Sinclair, John Fitzgerald seems to be trying to channel Leslie Howard in The Petrified Forest, his performance consisting of nothing but florid, inappropriate Shakespeare quotes and defeatist wisecracks, whilst the rest of the cast are mainly forgettable (that said though, a bit-part player called Frank Hawkins isn't bad as the canny farmer).

The work of a director named Richard M. Grey, who appears to have made hardly anything else, this minor effort's fate as having gone unseen for several decades is not particularly surprising. A museum piece from British cinema's archives that endures only for the academic interest it might hold for film scholars, there is essentially no entertainment value here for the casual viewer of today.

It is sometimes forgotten that Britain was facing an unprecedented crime wave at the time this no-frills low budget film was being shot, with record numbers of guns in circulation, and with a large number of deserters from the armed forces on the run. This kind of robbery culminating in murder was becoming a disturbing familiarity to contemporary audiences and the film has a certain gritty realism, including class tensions that play a part in the gang's downfall. A rare starring role for character actor John Harvey, whom in an active career was usually seen on the other side of the law playing various establishment types.

Unknown cast but very much out of line with the rather limp fare of the era - presumably due to precautionary caution of the director or producer - the violence is graphic even when off-camera. With its BBC radio "police announcement" seeking witnesses to the crime, it conjures up a time when gun crime was comparatively rare and all the more shocking - and the certainty of the rope the grim reward. The track in to the gangster moll's face - watchful with a slight smile - as someone is beaten and probably killed just off camera was a surprising escapee from the censor's scissors. Not remotely in the same class as Brighton Rock but it's equally shocking.

Thank you to Talking Pictures for showing it.

A fascinating relic, with a cool title, of a grim postwar Britain rife with brutish criminality (with an item about Mahatma Gandhi among the news on the radio) boasting a number of actors (John Harvey, Patrick Westwood) who continued to appear in smaller parts in bigger films, plus - incredibly - 'Agony's Maria Charles as a big-haired gangster's moll.

The cheap sets and unimaginative staging simply emphasise the nihilistic despair of this gang of losers in a manner that anticipates the equally claustrophobic 'Reservoir Dogs'.