“You Can’t Run Away from It” is a comic curiosity from the early career of Jack Lemmon, a musical filmed when studios were scrambling to lure filmgoers away from TV and when musicals were so overexposed — “The King and I,” “High Society” and “Carousel” came out the same year — they almost instantly went out of fashion.
“West Side Story” reset musicals a few years later, returning them to the ranks of rare “event” pictures where the genre remains to this day. And the cinema would find other ways to retain its “date night” place in life — eventually.
But it’s hard to imagine audiences not smelling the desperation and the old fashioned fustiness of this remake of the Frank Capra classic “It Happened One Night” when “You Can’t Run Away from It” hit theaters in 1956.
Leading man turned producer/director Dick Powell had transitioned from musicals to a terrific film noir cynic on one side of the camera. Here, he directs his wife June Allyson in a musical that Columbia Pictures cobbled together from a movie and short story it owned the rights to, with new songs by Johnny Mercer.
Filmed in Technicolor and presented in widescreen Cinemascope, “Run Away” was meant as a song-and-dance star vehicle for Allyson, pushing 40 and years removed from the lesser musicals (“Till the Clouds Roll By,” “Good News,” “Two Girls and a Sailor,””Best Foot Forward”) that made her name.
It didn’t pay off.
The sexy, sassy, downmarket Depression Era edge of “It Happened One Night” was lost in the well-scrubbed, conservative 1950s. A parade of forgettable Johnny Mercer songs, many of them crooned by the not-quite-forgotten Four Aces (pre-doo-wop) quartet, a dopey “Scarecrow Dance” sequence that showcases why Robert Sidney was best known for middling 1960s TV variety show choreography and a bus trip premise that had to seem out of date in the age of “See the USA in your Chevrolet” America had to provoke eyerolls in many a Baby Boomer, dragged to see this by their Liberace/Lawrence-Welk-loving parents.
And no amount of makeup could hide the obvious, that the smokey-voiced Allyson was entirely too old to be playing the gamine whose controlling rich daddy (Charles Bickford from “A Star is Born”) keeps getting her impulsive marriages to gold-digging rakes anulled.
But here’s Jack Lemmon as a fast-talking, hard-drinking, short-tempered and oft-fired newspaper reporter/smart-ass, the Clark Gable role in “It Happened One Night.” He sings, and not just the little bits of humming/crooning he did in many a comedy, but full on solos and duets.
Stubby Kaye (“Guys & Dolls,” “Cat Ballou”) leads a Greyhound busload of extras — and bus driver Henny Youngman (!) in a cornpone “Howdy Friends and Neighbors” tune from Mercer.
And funny folks like Jim Backus pop up, steal a scene, and exit. So it’s not a total waste of time.
Allyson is Ellie Andrews, whom we meet confined-to-quarters on her father’s 60 foot schooner in San Diego harbor. She’s just run off and married somebody new, not her first time.
And considering how much she repeats the phrase “never been alone with a man,” we have to wonder how she manages the meeting, courtship and falling-in-love business, even with ne’er do well playboys like Jacques Ballarino (Jacques Scott, entirely too colorless to register), her latest.
But rather than accept Daddy’s latest anullment, Ellie leaps overboard and swims past the anchored aircraft carriers to freedom. She’ll get back to Texas and “save” this scandalous, newspaper-headline “marriage.”
With Daddy’s minions (Dub Taylor among them) watching the train station and airports, Ellie opts for the bus. That’s how she and we run into Peter Warne (Lemmon), a reporter who just finished a bender/send-off with his colleagues. He’s been fired, and they serenade him with “Old reporters never die. They gradually decline.”
Newspapering. Nothing like it.
The “meet cute” is that she’s in his seat. Peter will shoo her out of it with a boorish “Scoot, scoot, scoot scoot,” but before they’ve crossed one time zone, he’ll have to save her from a “bop talking” hepcat and try to save her bag, with all her money in it, from a snatch-and-grab thief.
Peter figures out who she is, pitches the “scoop” to his old boss in Houston, keeping her out of Daddy’s grasp for this cross-country trek.
“You’re just a headline to me,” he tells the “spoiled brat.”
Scenes from “It Happened One Night” are repeated, verbatim — the “walls of Jericho” shared motel rooms (twin beds were all the rage), the hitchhiking, skirt-hiking bit Claudette Colbert pulled off in the original film now has a song to go with it.
Streams are crossed, wires are crossed and between the location-shot stream-fording and soundstage haystacks and “motor court” lodgings, love is bound to blossom.
Powell makes the best of all that he’s been given, but the script lacks almost anything in the way of snappy dialogue and the wide screen process pretty much swallows character comedies like this one.
Backus had one of the funniest voices in film, and the future Thurston Howell, III and Mister Magoo milks that for all it’s worth in a single scene. Youngman squeezes in a one-liner as both Ellie and Peter insist that he hold the bus and “wait” for them at a dinner stop.
“Sure lady…” “They don’t know, but they’ll never see me again. I just quit!”
“You Can’t Run Away from It” wasn’t a hit in 1956. And its relative obscurity is underscored by the lack of color still shots of it floating around the Internet. It was lightly regarded, then and now.
But Lemmon made every role memorable and every leading lady likeable just by his presence. His manic patter early years were made for “screwball,” or its nearest equivalent in square 1950s and early ’60s America cinema.
Check out his “She’s my wife” exchange with sniggering “swingin’ safari” bus riding “daddio” on-the-make George Shapely, played by Paul Gilbert.
“Swing it over’t the other seat, boy. Blow, dad!”
He’d find his “Everynebbish” guise a few years later, in “The Apartment.” But the callous kid/blowhard of “Mister Roberts” grows up and grows an edge in “You Can’t Run Away from It,” a movie that figured out Lemmon was at his funniest when he was at his testiest.
Rating: approved, TV-PG
Cast: June Allyson, Jack Lemmon, Stubby Kaye, Jim Backus, Henny Youngman, Jack Albertson, Howard McNear, Elvia Allman, Dub Taylor and Charles Bickford
Credits: Directed by Dick Powell, scripted by Robert Riskin and Claude Binyon, based on a short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams and the movie “It Happened One Night,” songs by Johnny Mercer. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi.
Running time: 1:35
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