You Can’t Run Away from It * (1956, June Allyson, Jack Lemmon) – Classic Movie Review 11,969

Producer-director Dick Powell’s 1956 musical comedy film You Can’t Run Away from It stars June Allyson and Jack Lemmon, and is a remake of the Oscar-winning 1934 film It Happened One Night, which had previously been remade as a musical comedy in 1945 as Eve Knew Her Apples.

The star support cast features Charles Bickford, Jim Backus, Stubby Kaye, Jack Albertson and Howard McNear. Cinematographer Charles Lawton Jnr shoots in CinemaScope and Technicolor, which should be nice but makes you long for the black and white of the original.

Columbia Pictures find that there are a few film classics you just can’t remake. In this one, Manhattan socialite heiress Ellie Andrews (June Allyson) runs from her arranged wedding and meets up with an amiable, romantically inclined newsman Peter Warne (Jack Lemmon).

If the plot is familiar, it comes from It Happened One Night, and all the magic happened on that night, not this one. Given an impossible task, even genial Allyson and Lemmon cannot remotely compete with memories of Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, though they are pleasant enough. Charles Bickford scores as Allyson’s grumpy dad who comes to find her and bring her back.

In an effort, no doubt, to make it different from the original, there are pauses for songs by Johnny Mercer and Gene de Paul and, even more unexpectedly, a ballet.

The screenplay is by Claude Binyon and Robert Riskin. The Oscar-winning writer Robert Riskin was hired to rework his 1934 screenplay, based on a story called Night Bus by Samuel Hopkins Adams.

Unsurprisingly, one of Lemmon’s least known films, as well as one of Lemmon’s least good films. You can always run away from it.

Dick Powell films as director: Split Second (1953), The Conqueror (1956), You Can’t Run Away from It (1956), The Enemy Below (1957), and The Hunters (1958).

Also in the cast are Paul Gilbert, Allyn Joslyn, Henny Youngman, Jacques Scott, Walter Baldwin, Byron Foulger, Richard H Cutting, Louise Beavers, Raymond Greenleaf, Howard McNear, Elvie Allman, Edwin Chandler, Jack Albertson, Queenie Smith, William Forrest, Frank Sully, Dub Taylor, Steve Benton, Bill Walker, Herb Vigran, and Larry J Blake.

On 19 August 1945, June Allyson defied MGM studio chief Louis B Mayer by marrying Dick Powell. She asked Mayer to give her away at the wedding and he agreed but put her on suspension anyway.

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 11,969

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