This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Best movie ever!

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I was really enjoying this at first. The first fifteen or twenty minutes seemed a good set-up for a premise that sounds exciting and suspenseful. Then suddenly Laurence Harvey is walking around with dyed blonde hair and a terrible Aussie accent and the film derails itself from there. Literally nothing happens for over half an hour. Just characters going to dinner with each other and talking a lot about nothing. Carol Reed was a great director who has done much better but his attempts at building suspense between the insurance agent and the couple fell flat, in my opinion. I've seen a few reviews that referred to this as a "great cat and mouse thriller." Personally I think this is very misleading as it implies this is a movie full of action and intrigue when there's very little of either.The actors are fine, for the most part. Harvey's fake Australian accent is terrible and he tends to overact more than under. Alan Bates is good for a rather dull part. Lee Remick is beautiful and does OK with the material but her character makes choices we have to make guesses as to the reasoning behind and that sort of thing always bugs me. Anyway, check it out if you come across it. Your opinion might be more favorable than mine. It's not a bad film, just not a particularly good one.

"The Ballad of the Running Man" (also called "The Running Man") is a frustrating film. It starts off very well and about midway through, it all seems to fall to pieces. It's a real shame, as the movie hooked me and then just left me hanging.The film begins with a funeral. Rex has apparently died--leaving a young widow, Stella (Lee Remmick). However, a bit later you learn that Rex (Laurence Harvey) is NOT dead but has been faking it. Why? Because he felt the insurance company had cheated him when he'd been in an accident. In a way, you feel a bit sorry for the couple.Rex disappears to Spain and has created a whole new identity as a blond Aussie. Stella soon joins him--but they cannot act like husband and wife because they don't want to arouse suspicions. During this time, you see a significant change in Rex. He's really enjoying the high-life and seems ready to perhaps commit insurance fraud again--whereas Stella just wants to settle down some place and live a quiet life. He's a great portrait of a sociopath, that's for sure.All this is quite interesting. However, what happens next is pretty limp. The same insurance man who paid off on Rex's supposed death just happens to be in Spain and meets up with the grieving widow and her new friend, the Aussie (Rex). It's pretty obvious that he's caught them and yet absolutely nothing happens for the next 30 or so minutes. The three go to dinner, have drinks, go to the beach and a lot of other mundane things. Then, completely out of the blue, Stella sleeps with the insurance man--and you are left very confused wondering as to why she did that. In fact, not understanding folks' motivations becomes a big problem with the film. Because of this, it made me feel like I'd wasted my time watching. It really looks like they'd only written half the script and just decided to wing it in the middle.

Who was first in this "suspense" genre? Was it Carol Reed or Alfred Hitchcock? In "Running Man" Carol Reed uses much the same formula as Hitch. Music? Yes, well. The bloke with a problem? Sure. The very pretty blonde? Of course. That was the James Bond movies, too. In the end, who cares? Get a good story - yes, it was a good story - and get a good cameraman, and you are home and hosed. So my bias is showing. An Australian cinematographer of renown, even an Aussie, John Meillon as the walk-on rich sheep farmer who loses his identity. A weak point that. Without a passport, how was he to travel? The accents. John Meillon's normal voice is educated Australian. What on earth persuaded him to adopt an exaggerated Ocker accent? I mean, rich Aussie sheep farmers, if anything, will often adopt a plummy "received" accent. And Laurence Harvey. Where were all the voice coaches? "Running Man" was a fair attempt at the suspense genre. But it did not ever have me on the edge of the seat. When I first saw it nearly 60 years ago, I was looking for the great camera work. I think one aerial sequence has been cut for the TV version. It was superb.

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.