The Runaround (1946)

Directed by Charles Lamont; produced by Joseph Gershenson

The Continental Detective Agency’s star investigator, Eddie Kildane (Rod Cameron), has had enough of his thoughtless, heartless, dictatorial chief, Prentiss (Broderick Crawford), so he and partner, Wally Quayle (Frank McHugh) quit and establish their own business. Clients are hard to come by when you’re starting out, though, so they steal one from their old boss. The assignment: find the client’s run-away daughter. It won’t be easy, with the woman in question (Ella Raines) doing her best to evade capture, and a rival trying to steal his case back.

The enjoyable aspect of how I choose movies to watch - usually based on a one- or two-sentence synopsis of the plot and a few viewer reviews – is that I sometimes find rarely-seen gems, small-scale epics or under-rated entertainments, such as The Runaround. The plot is more than a little reminiscent of It Happened One Night, with a determined man trying to deliver an escaped daughter to her parents. But The Runaround stands well on its own merits, one of the chief advantages being the sub-plot (or, rather, co-plot) of Broderick constantly on Cameron’s trail, one step behind here, one step ahead there. This is while Cameron has his hands full with Raines’s attempts to elude him.

The dialogue is good, though the script is better when it comes to action, both in terms of dramatic action and of physical movement. Cameron’s character is quick-witted and clever, with a hundred tricks up his sleeve: stealing cars, framing competitors, planting decoys and get-aways in the night are all part of the story. The protagonist can also handle himself in a fist-fight, of which there are several, though he is no super-hero; he takes more than one beating.

Rod Cameron had to have been one of the busiest actors in the 1940s and ‘50s (eleven movies released in 1941; five in 1955, while also filming a television series). A Canadian (born just two hours away from where I live), he has a casual and easy manner about him in The Runaround, and he and Raines have an excellent chemistry. Raines herself manages comedy and light drama well. McHugh was often a film’s comic relief, usually of the clownish or broad type. Here, his character provides the common sense against Cameron’s adventurous, though not reckless, impetuosity.

Like It Happened One Night, filmed twelve years previously, The Runaround provides a series of vignettes of the United States of the time, with uniformed moving-men, roadside hamburger stalls and airports where security didn’t need to be considered. Though these elements were hardly included as a conscious acknowledgement of future nostalgia, they are entertaining nonetheless. Added to the cast, the writing and the acting, The Runaround is a movie worth seeing.