A Sombra de uma Fraude

excellent thriller about man and wife who plan a scam to swindle the insurance company for a large amount of money after being turned down after a legitimate claim was turn down earlier and the deception begins and they go on the run in Spain where life's fine until the insurance man turns up in the same places, thats where the fun and tension begins.there's great camera work & direction by carol reed and a edgy script by john Mortimer,lots of colour and location works very well as does the three actors,Harvey is at his reptilian and charming best with Remick quite stunning as the not so wife and bates as the dogged insurance man.a delightful diverting film for a Sunday afternoon.

Good drama with a bit of mystery thrown in. It's hard to say what's more beautiful in this movie the locations, which are breathtaking or Lee Remick and Alan Bates both at the peak of their individual attractiveness who are equally stunning. They offer the best performances doing an uncertain dance around each other never sure of the other's motives. Laurence Harvey is his usual squirrelly pompous self but that fits the role. Well known to be an abrasive, selfish, uncooperative and egotistical jerk behind the scenes Harvey apparently was incredibly difficult on this shoot to the point where Lee Remick refused to discuss the problems but was quoted as saying "The tales I can tell of working with him are too horrendous to repeat." Not a classic Reed film but he guides the film well although apparently his confidence had been shaken by exiting another troubled production, the Marlon Brando Mutiny on the Bounty, just prior to this.

A bitter airline pilot fakes his own death and gets his wife to collect the money. They escape to sunny Europe after committing a perfect crime. But, of course, there's always the dogged investigator to make things difficult.

This movie is a good afternoon's diversion. It's bright, flashy and pacey. With John Mortimer writing and Carol Reed directing, it has a certain touch of class. It's not an A list movie by any means, but a quick look in any reference book will tell you that it's well respected. Good performances, bright locations and a decent pace make this well worth a look.

A decent enough thriller but one that really needed a Hitchcock or at least a director who knew how to mould the somewhat far-fetched material into something more plausible than this. Instead we get Carol Reed on something of an off-day and he seems more content to let the material carry itself rather than actually do something with it.

Laurence Harvey is seriously miscast as the serial insurance fraudster pursued to Spain by Alan Bates' insurance investigator while Lee Remick does what she can with the rather thankless part of Harvey's wife. Bates is very good and just about carries the picture while the cat-and-mouse scenario is often exciting and Robert Krasker's widescreen cinematography, (it was shot mostly in the South of Spain), is certainly attractive. It's the kind of film you might expect from someone like Michael Anderson or a host of other serviceable directors slumming it in some exotic locale but from Reed you really do expect more.

For those who resent paying their insurance premiums--and who amongst us doesn't--there is Carol Reed's The Running Man, not to be confused with the Arnold Schwarzinator film of the same name. The always dapper but much too thin Laurence Harvey stars as Rex Black, a professional pilot whose insurance claim is turned down by frosty Allan Cuthbertson due to coverage that expired two days prior to an accident. Enraged, Harvey and wife (played by an icily beautiful Lee Remick) launch a scheme to bilk the insurance company of a very large sum of money. Unfortunately, claims adjustor Alan Bates is on the job to complicate matters for the felonious couple. John Mortimer's screenplay is a bit flat and frankly unbelievable at times, but the superb cast more than makes up for it. The film, shot in colour and on location in Spain, looks gorgeous, but Encore is airing a pan-and-scan print that severely compromises the original Panavision framing. At least this print retains a widescreen credits sequence, which features some superb work by Bond main man Maurice Binder.