“The Running Man” is a heavy-handed 1960s crime-and-greed parable that has nothing to do with the 1980s Richard Bachman (Stephen King) novel or the Schwarzenegger film made from that.

This version is most interesting because it’s built around a superbly-sinister performance by Laurence Harvey, who made too few films in his cancer-shortened career, but almost all of them worth seeing.

There’s also a peak-period Lee Remick co-starring turn (She died too young, too.), and a taste of Alan Bates just as he was emerging as one of Britain’s screen actors to watch.

It’s not one of the best films by “Third Man/Oliver” director Carol Reed. I mean, it’s about insurance fraud, after all, faking one’s death for a check and all that. But there’s a bit of suspense, the action beats are solid and the Spanish locations a veritable time capsule of a the era.

Harvey is Rex Black, a devil-may-care aviation-mad pilot who is being eulogized as the film opens. He died in a glider accident, the priest intones, leaving lovely American Stella (Remick) a young widow. But she’s not all that torn up about it. And with good reason.

Rex shows up at her back door shortly after the service. It was all a scheme to get even with an insurance company that failed to pay out for an earlier crackup he had (seen in a detailed but clumsily-inserted flashback that Stella dreams).

“We’re only getting back what they really owe us,” Rex insists, and she goes along, taking his instructions about what to do with the settlement and how to reconnect with him because he’s off to Malaga on the Costa del Sol.

What’s the point of faking your death if you’re not going someplace nice?

But he hasn’t even left the house before an insurance claims investigator (Bates) tactlessly shows up and tactlessly cracks how “lucky” she is, with this policy and all.

Months Stella later makes her way south when that check (cheque) clears, only to discover that Rex has dyed his hair blond and grown a mustache, also blond.

He’s hanging with some Malaga swingers — mostly Spanish — and partying hard. He’s swiped the passport of a tipsy Australian sheep baron and is passing himself off as womaning, free-spending Jim Jerome, with half a million sheep and a ranch the “size of Wales.”

“Well, I’m sorry” she says, sizing up the love of her life in this guise, “but I don’t LIKE Mr. Jerome.”

No worries. They’re going to “get rid” of “him” the same way Rex got rid of himself. He’s gotten away with one insurance hustle, why not another?

A shocked Stella barely has time to process this when that she stumbles into this Englishman, Stephen (Bates) whom she can’t quite place. And when she does, both she and Rex have reason for alarm.

The insurance man fails to ID himself as an insurance man or where they’ve met. He politely — at least more politely than he did in the UK — expresses an interest in the “widow,” and asks her out.

At Rex’s insistance, she agrees. The film tracks Stella’s wariness, attempts to sound this Stephen fellow out and her barely-controlled sense of alarm, Rex’s rising mania and the poker face that this persistent Brit — whom they can’t shake despite taking off for a road trip through Andalusia — shows as he gets to know the widow and this accent-comes-and-goes Aussie who seems to have become the new widow’s “particular friend,” as Jane Austen used to put it.

Reed serves up one lighter touch in all this rising suspicion and suspense. Free-wheeling/free-spending Rex has rented a car for all this galivanting. It’s not like the tiny open-top roadster MG-TC he tooled around Blighty in. He got himself a new ’62 Lincoln Continental convertible to motor from Malaga to Algeciras, via tiny streets and narrow, winding moutain roads.

If there is a car of that era more unsuitable for such a trip, complete with a couple of harrowing chase scenes, it is this ultimate Yank Tank. I couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of Harvey hurtling down alleys and built for horse-drawn carts, navigable by Fiats and SEATS, but which had to be cleared to make way for this behemoth to pass.

Reed, to his credit, doesn’t always have the streets cleared, making for some harrowing navigation through crowds and a lot of frantic horn-honking looped in during post-production.

I also love the way this film doesn’t translate the Spanish Stella encounters, which she doesn’t understand, Rex isn’t fluent with and Stephen’s “commercial” Spanish barely relates to.

You don’t realize how much modern films spoon-feed today’s audiences until you watch the occasional classic, where we don’t need to see every city (especially the iconic ones) ID’d with a graphic intertitle. The idea of putting us in the shoes of the heroine — at a loss at understanding what’s being said to her, about her and around her in a foreign land as she’s trying to dodge prison — by not subtitling the Spaniards, making us paranoid on her behalf, seems like a no-brainer when you see it.

Not many modern filmmakers would have the confidence to demand that sort of effort from the viewer.

The travelogue elements heighten the enjoyment of this thriller, especially in the third act. The peculiar border situation between Spain and British Gibraltar was a tad more tense back then and Reed makes great use of the simple fact that to enter Gibraltar you still, to this day, have to cross an active runway on the one flat piece of land connected to The Rock.

An increasingly frantic and paranoid pilot might have good reason to ditch a Lincoln in just such a spot.

And look for future “French Connection” villain Fernando Rey as a Spanish police officer, years before international stardom came Rey’s way.

I enjoyed this “Running Man” more than I expected to. There’s not a lot of heavy intellection lifting going on here, but Harvey’s version of a downward spiral is fun to watch, Remick was at her most beguiling as a woman trapped between two men and a literal rock and a hard place, Bates is believably smitten and Reed keeps it all on the move, despite or perhaps because he picked the very worst car to accomplish that with, the clever devil.

Rating: “approved” (TV-14)

Cast: Laurence Harvey, Lee Remick, Alan Bates

Credits: Directed by Carol Reed, scripted by John Mortimer, based on a novel by Shelley Smith. A Columbia release on Tubi, etc.

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