SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

jjnxn-1 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.

dbdumonteil The problem is Laurence Harvey:not only he is rather ugly dyed in blond but he is also not really able to create a "second man.";it is like a puppet theater where you can see the string man's hands everywhere;the screenplay should insist on this second identity :thus Harvey's best scene is when he sees his reflection in the water and cannot stand it ;but anyway he is better cast as a victim ("the Manchurian candidate" " of human bondage") than when he is a cynical crook ;besides,the long flashback ,when Remick is sleeping, seems like padding Having said that ,the movie is entertaining,Remick is as talented as usual and very good -looking;Bates gives an ambiguous mysterious performance:are we sure he works in paint?Note Bnuelian Fernando Ray in a small part of a cop.

st-shot In The Ballad of the Running Man director Carol Reed steps into the light and fades fast with this placid thriller that takes place in sunny Spain. Far from the dark moody confines of Belfast and post war Vienna Reed's magic touch reacts to the sun like Count Dracula.After pilot Rex Black (Laurence Harvey) crashes his plane and then finds out his insurance policy had lapsed two days earlier he vows to get what's coming to him. With wife Stella (Lee Remick) in on it he feigns drowning and runs off to Spain to await his pay day on a newly issued policy. Before rendezvousing with Rex, Stella is interviewed by an insurance adjuster (Alan Bates) who coincidentally turns up in Spain where he crosses paths with Stella and Rex who has grown a moustache, dyed his hair tangerine and assumed another identity. Stella soon finds herself compromised, further complicating the cat and mouse game.Reed and his magnificent camera man Robert Krasker bring only their reputations to this ho hum suspense that has none of the urgency and tempo of their classic work together. What the sun doesn't expose the flood lights do without a hint of ominous shadowing as Reed's interiors reek of set look and his exteriors travelogue.Bates and Remick slowly build to a decent chemistry but Harvey is over the top and his attempt at an Australian accent comes across like the mother in The Glass Menagerie. The real culprit remains Reed however who also produced the picture which gave him every opportunity to showcase his formidable talent. But from the look of Running Man the accountant has replaced the artist.

Rae Stabosz This movie had the misfortune of being released just around the time of JFK's assassination, where it got swallowed up in the general grief of the time. It did not do well at the box office, and one of its publicity stunts backfired when Dallas police saw personal ads in the newspaper signed by "Lee" and asking to meet up at an appointed place. The police thought it might be a Lee Harvey Oswald connection, not a Lee Remick stunt -- and spent some time chasing down this blind alley.I caught the film while flipping channels in the middle of the night and quite enjoyed it.Laurence Harvey plays an airline pilot/owner who loses out when a two-days' late insurance premium lets his insurance company deny his legitimate claim after he crashes his plane in the sea, narrowly escaping with his life. An honest guy with a love of risk-taking and a mutually reciprocated passion for his beautiful wife, Lee Remick, he decides to get back at the insurance company by faking his own death, with his wife's reluctant collusion. She hopes that this will get his anger out of his system and give them enough money to live comfortably, which seems to be why she goes along with the scheme. But at heart she just wants a quiet, comfortable life, an "ordinary life", she tells him. He, however, takes to life at the edges quite wonderfully, and pretty soon he's all about living the high life and risking their freedom with additional swindling schemes.Alan Bates plays the insurance investigator who comes round to the wife asking questions after her husband's "death". He has a whole Columbo thing going on, asking questions in an affable, bumbling way that always seems to indicate he knows more than he is letting on. He turns up again in Malaga, Spain, where the couple has gone with the insurance money to start their new life. Again, he's got the questions that could be innocent or could be a dogged inspector following his prey.Harvey decides that the best way to keep an eye on Bates is to invite him along to enjoy the Malaga sun and surf with the two of them. The three of them hang out together, swimming and eating and drinking and enjoying what Bates says is his vacation time and Harvey claims is a working vacation. Remick is supposed to be the new widow, technically single, who gravitates to the orbit of the Australian rich guy that Harvey is impersonating.At the movie's emotional core is, yes, a love triangle, as Lee Remick grows disenchanted with her husband's attraction to the James Bond lifestyle while discovering that Alan Bates likes museums and quiet walks, like she does, and seems to like her.So it's cat and mouse between the two guys on two levels -- over the insurance money and over the woman. The Malaga locations are glorious and reminded me of the villages in Romancing the Stone where Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas run across weddings, dancing, and general romantic danger.The movie doesn't take itself seriously, and the characters are conflicted in a way that you don't know what to hope for and what the final moral and romantic resolutions will be. Will the husband redeem himself? Will the wife stay true to him or fall in with the man who is on his tail? Harvey is not irredeemable and we do feel sympathy for him, and see that he is more oblivious to his wife's unhappiness than deliberately mean. He treats her as an extension of himself and just doesn't recognize that she has no interest in playing Bonnie to his Clyde.Good flick. Not great, but good.