10:45am PST – Runaway, The (1961) – A priest and a dog help a young delinquent find a new lease on life. Cast: Cesar Romero, Nacho Galindo, Chick Chandler, St. Mike (A Greyhound) Dir: Claudio Guzman BW-85 mins, TV-G
A four decade delay in getting your film before the public has to be frustrating, but you could do worse than having The Mighty Robert Osbourne be the first to present it to the world. After forty-plus years of languishing in some vault, “The Runaway” finally premiered last November on Turner Classic Movies. A friend of mine who knows the filmmaker alerted me, and I was glad he did because the film is charming and as an added bonus casts star Cesar Romero in a rare straightforward, subdued role as a Priest.
Here’s some background:
Often classified as a lost film, The Runaway (1962) was conceived as a family film but never had an opportunity to find its audience due to a problem with rights issues that prevented it from being released in theatres. Although the movie was made on a low budget, it was clearly a labor of love for the filmmakers who grounded the film in a reality established by the unglamorous settings and the unsentimental nature of the story. Felipe, as played by Roger Mobley, is not the sort of sweet-natured adolescent hero you’d find in a Walt Disney live-action film of the same era. Instead, he’s a tough, street-smart waif with a foul mouth who is quick to anger and has an obvious problem with authority figures. While The Runaway might not be a masterpiece, it is a refreshing change of pace from the usual cliché-ridden “boy and his dog” stories churned out by Hollywood.The film is also notable as one of Haskell Wexler’s early efforts as cinematographer. He collaborated with veteran cameraman Ray Foster on The Runaway, capturing the dusty backwater towns along the California-Mexican border where economically-depressed conditions result in broken homes and runaways like Felipe. Wexler worked on the film between filming Angel Baby in 1961 and Face in the Rain in 1963 and you can see some of the cinematographer’s emerging style in the hand-held tracking shot of Felipe wandering the streets at night in the opening credit sequence of The Runaway.
Haskell Wexler is one of the finest cinematographers to ever stand behind a camera. Five times he’s been nominated for the Oscar, and twice he’s won, once for “Bound for Glory” (1976), which, in my opinion, might be the best photographed film of the last forty years.
If that’s not enough to entice you, here’s the scoop on the film’s young star, Roger Mobley:
Although he had already appeared in several feature films and television shows when he starred in The Runaway, he would become a more confident performer as he grew older, eventually winning major roles in Walt Disney’s Emil and the Detectives [1964] and their TV series Disneyland. In 1968, he was drafted, went to Viet Nam, joined the Green Berets and later returned to the U.S. to become an undercover narcotics agent. His attempt at a film and TV career comeback in the late seventies/early eighties failed and he is currently a pastor in Texas. Maybe Cesar Romero’s priest in The Runaway had a positive effect on him after all.
The TCM description doesn’t say so, but “The Runaway” has a strong spiritual theme to go along with a winning performance by Mobley, who has great chemistry with Romero, and a simple, heartfelt, briskly paced story told well.
Well worth a look, and if you haven’t destroyed your kids with MTV, they’ll love it.
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