As some other reviewers on here have noted, ESCAPE ROUTE is something of a lacklustre effort considering the talent which has gone into the production. It's one of those British B-films which features a washed-up American star who some might say is slumming it in his part. This time around it's George Raft who gives a particularly bored and wooden performance as an American investigator who arrives on British shores searching for the men who have kidnapped some nuclear scientists.
Yep, it's another thriller that utilises Cold War tensions as a backdrop for its story, but ESCAPE ROUTE is a staged and rather dull entry in the genre. There are no plot ingredients in this one to be remembered more than a couple of hours after watching. There's a lot of interviewing, a lot of chasing around, a lot of people being driven places in cars, and a lot of padding with pursuing police and the like. The plot is faintly ridiculous as it sees Raft skipping customs and thus being the subject of a massive manhunt just for being an illegal alien, hardly high stakes.
Raft's love interest is about half his age and the actress playing her couldn't be more obviously disinterested. The only actor of note is Clifford Evans playing a stock role with which he was more than familiar. The direction was by American B-movie exponent Seymour Friedman with help from Peter Graham Scott, a man best known for later directing and producing kid's TV shows in the 1970s.
Yep, it's another thriller that utilises Cold War tensions as a backdrop for its story, but ESCAPE ROUTE is a staged and rather dull entry in the genre. There are no plot ingredients in this one to be remembered more than a couple of hours after watching. There's a lot of interviewing, a lot of chasing around, a lot of people being driven places in cars, and a lot of padding with pursuing police and the like. The plot is faintly ridiculous as it sees Raft skipping customs and thus being the subject of a massive manhunt just for being an illegal alien, hardly high stakes.
Raft's love interest is about half his age and the actress playing her couldn't be more obviously disinterested. The only actor of note is Clifford Evans playing a stock role with which he was more than familiar. The direction was by American B-movie exponent Seymour Friedman with help from Peter Graham Scott, a man best known for later directing and producing kid's TV shows in the 1970s.