Very disappointed :(

A Disappointing Continuation

The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

This is an okay, rather lighthearted crime/newspaper picture, not at all the grim movie one would expect from the title. Its main detriment is Brenda Marshall, who has zero chemistry with George Brent (looking a bit seedy, but a bit like a second-string Clark Gable), an unattractive profile, and a very tight, cold, humourless manner. What William Holden saw in her, God alone knows. But Brent is as smooth as ever, and there are old friends like Roscoe Karns, Percy Halton, and the chillingly believable Eduardo Ciannelli, with his face rapidly collapsing from Joker-style phony bonhomie to ice-cold murder.The plot doesn't take itself very seriously, and is sometimes indecipherable, but there are plenty of amusing scenes. But, though Brenda is unsympathetic, the treatment of her, expressing the 1940s idea of the "right" way to live, still has a nasty taste. Three times during the movie she faints dead away because of what she hears, sees, or fears she is about to see (ie, women are not tough enough to be reporters). Then, at the end of the movie, she says she won't give up her career after marriage to George Brent, that they won't have children for a long time. His gesture to the camera shows that he will make sure that's not the case. While a similar "adult" joke at the end of Bachelor Mother was very cute, this is quite unpleasant. It says that Brent will make his wife pregnant against her will and without her knowledge (a very unpleasant picture comes to mind). At the time this was considered cute too, but it sure isn't now.

"You Can't Escape Forever" is a great title for a film, although I'm not convinced it fits this story. This movie is really crisply done. All the scenes clip along and never linger too long. The reading of the lines by the actors are so rapid fire that Frank Fox the dialogue director must have worked overtime. The opening execution scene made me chuckle. There always seems to be a thunderstorm happening when someone is about to be strapped to the electric chair. In this case they did use the atmosphere as part of the story and not simply a clichéd mood device. I didn't find "Forever" a waste of time, but there was nothing about it that will linger in my movie memory banks for an extended period of time.

You Can't Escape Forever is an odd duck: it's a bottom of the bill second feature that successfully blends comedy, romance, gangsters, and old dark house thrills. George Brent plays the crusading editor of a local paper out to put the kibosh on the activities of a local black marketeer, played to absolute perfection by Edward Cianelli, surely one of the least appreciated heavies of Hollywood history. Brent is aided by lady love/gal reporter Brenda Marshall and comic foil Roscoe Karns, and the film manages to take in a trip to the Death House, a deserted columbarium, and a lonely hearts club apparently modeled after Conan Doyle's Red Headed League. There are some very well choreographed action sequences and beautiful cinematography by James Van Trees and Tony Gaudio, the masters of low budget photography. If you like 'B' features, you will be more than satisfied with You Can't Escape Forever--even if the title seems somewhat inappropriate considering that villain Varney (Joe Downing), in an apparent oversight by Joseph Breen's office, actually DOES escape the chair!

The entire film uses that hectic non-stop dialogue style that was far more frequent in the black and white days. It makes it kind of difficult to feel involved, more like you are watching a comedy show than a film. And the means with which the main story is introduced, in the same blase fashion, doesn't lend it any gravity. In the end you feel you have watched a long episode of an old sit-com.