La route de la mort

Escape Route is a low budget quickie with ageing US star George Raft as Steve Rossi.

Rossi shows up in London, skipping the immigration queue and looking for an old friend called Grand.

Grand is elusive and wants to stay that way. Rossi is in fact a FBI agent who is investigating a gang kidnapping western scientists and taking them to Eastern Europe. Rossi teams up with the British secret service agent Joan Miller (Sally Gray) to apprehend Grand.

Raft looks a bit stiff and the romance with his younger star Sally Gray looks a bit ikky.

The film is ponderous, the title of the movie makes no sense. It is efficient but the plot seems all over the place with no tension or thrills.

In one of his Lippert Pictures George Raft shot this one in London where he plays an FBI agent on the trail of some scientists who've been kidnapped in various western countries and presumably taken to the Soviet Union to work for the other side. To accomplish his mission Raft has to team up with Sally Gray of British Intelligence who is both pretty and useful.

By that I mean anyone who could reverse a custody situation and get George Raft in a hammerlock has to be a girl you can get serious about when the mission is completed.

Even though the film isn't quite 80 minutes it moves along at a ponderous pace. Raft looked bored throughout the film, his paycheck must have cleared and he was going through the motions. His days as a top star were over and he was reduced to Poverty Row Lippert Pictures to get enough money to pay that huge tax bill Uncle Sam was smacking him with.

Clifford Evans as the mastermind of the kidnappings had some interesting moments. But the film is definitely mediocre.

The Soviets have been kidnapping scientists from all over the world. FBI agent Steve Rossi (George Raft) sneaks into England to try to infiltrate the kidnapping ring. He is captured by MI5 agent Joan Miller and she joins his mission.

This is a British espionage thriller. There isn't much thrilling. There is not much action to speak of other than a slow ride down an elevator. The elevator is more interesting than the fight. There is no great spy craft. It's a lot of static talking with intermittent moments of something possibly interesting. It's not enough.

This is no noir, and at least on my disc, the sound was not good.

Many actors post-war went to England and did a lot of these B movies, which are done with next to no budget. Among the actors who participated: Dennis O'Keefe, Robert Preston, Dane Clark, and Cesar Romero. I have to say they're fun and sometimes atmospheric.

This one, with George Raft, has some good atmosphere - bombed-out London and some nice interiors.

In the story, nuclear scientists are kidnapped and taken behind the Iron Curtain. An undercover FBI agent (Raft) and a British agent (Frederick Piper) are assigned to capture the kidnappers. Raft sneaks into the country, escaping immigration, in order to draw attention to himself so he would be seen as wanted and nonthreatening.

What winds up happening is that the British agent's assistant, played by Sally Gray, ends up with Raft as they track the kidnappers.

This is pretty ordinary stuff. I like both Gray and Raft. Raft had a real warmth about him when he was at Warners, but I think he's one actor who needed a good director. Here he's elegant but monotoned.

Just okay. Unfortunately, this was Sally Gray's last film. She was invited to go to Hollywood but instead married a Lord who was in the House of Lords, stayed married to him for 52 years, and never worked again. He was 100 when he died; she was 91.

The story goes that her stepson was a friend of John Lennon's and is the subject of "A Day in the Life of a Fool."

This is being advertised as part of a film noir collection. Its is definitely not noir. It is a cheap B&W second run British post-war espionage mystery. It has some very good London exteriors showing WWII bombed out building, streets, and vintage cars but that's about it. George Raft is his usual upright, erect, suave self and the story is hokey, naturally there is a female romantic interest thrown in as usual formula but it is not objectionable or at all a waste of time, it's a good display of a has-been American actor on the cheap to a a thrifty British production and that's all. It is watchable, you don't want to turn it off, so see it for what it is without any high expectations.