Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka Escape Route

• Directed by Seymour Friedman
• Written by John V. Baines and Nicholas Phipps
• Starring
  • George Raft
  • Sally Gray
  • Frederick Piper
  • Reginald Tate
  • Clifford Evans

Some movies “get good” right from the first moments. Some have a ramp-up time, but still hook the viewer within a few minutes. With I’ll Get You, I was still waiting for it to get good when the closing credits rolled.

A narrated preamble tells us about two or three abducted scientists or aircraft engineers in as many countries. I’m torn as to whether this preamble, which is usually a sign of desperation of one sort or another, was added after the fact to help the movie not suck so bad or whether it was lazy writing from the get-go. Either way, as the stentorian voice spells out what we’ll need to know, George Raft (last seen around these parts in Man From Cairo (1953)) is established as Steve Rossi, a production designer who had been working with one of the abducted airplane design savants.

“Dang it, I can never remember if I’m supposed to button my coat on the right side or the left in England.”

When the intro ends, Rossi is in an airplane landing in London. The passengers troop off dutifully behind the flight attendant across the tarmac to the immigration building — all except Rossi, who “sneaks” away down a wide open alley between buildings and to the front of the terminal, where he hitches a ride with an accommodating fellow being picked up in a private car.

Suddenly, the police come unglued. They get a picture from America of this “illegal alien,” tell all units to be on the lookout, and — no joke — get his picture out to the newspapers, where it will run on the front page. I can only say: a) wouldn’t it be easier on the law enforcement budget simply to plug the gaping holes at the airport? and b) must be a really slow news week.

You let a woman get the slip on you?! You’re going to lose all your masculinity, George Raft!

Rossi goes to a high-class bar and asks the bartender how to contact one Michael Grand. The bartender claims ignorance, but gives him a scrawled address on his check. Rossi takes a cab to that address, a small apartment occupied by a blonde floozy. She denies even knowing Grand but is otherwise friendly enough, so he gives her some money to go out and buy him a new coat and hat to change his appearance. When she gets back, her memory is improved by a little bit of leftover money from the shopping trip, and she gives him another address. He takes a cab to that one, where another blonde named Joan (Sally Gray) says she’s Mr. Grand’s personal secretary, but doesn’t know when he’ll be back. And when Rossi proposes to sit right there until Grand shows up, she takes him at gunpoint in her car to meet yet another man named Wilkes (Reginald Tate).

It’s been over twenty minutes since the curtain went up. IS THE SUSPENSE KILLING YOU???

Told ya.

Rossi, it seems, had been offered a job by Grand, and is just now taking him up on it. Wilkes commends him into Joan’s care; she’s to keep him as a semi-willing houseguest until Grand shows up. The time together in her flat gives us the beginnings of one of the least convincing screen romances of all time. Not only is George Raft twenty-one years older than Sally Gray, it’s the kind of old that stresses the separateness of generations, not just the number of wrinkles. You can much sooner imagine Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment (199) — separated by thirty-nine years –than Raft and Gray. And the performers aren’t able to demonstrate any convincing spark; they simply mutter at each other until the script says it’s time to start smiling and saying caring things.

The next morning, Joan’s busybody neighbor across the hall recognizes Rossi’s picture on the front page of the paper (bumping the investigative feature on cow-tipping to Section B-1) and calls the cops, whom they evade. It’s not until Rossi’s second meeting with Wilkes that they start to fill him in: Wilkes and Joan are British intelligence agents, trying to get their own hands on Grand. If Rossi comes to work for them instead of Grand, they’ll make it worth the while. After all, Rossi’s photo is in every paper, thus letting Grand know that Rossi’s in England, presumably looking for him to discuss that job offer, so he won’t be suspicious if Rossi tries to find him.

When the Nazis hand you lemons, make lemonade — er, movies in the bombed-out buildings!

And thus it continues, with Rossi and Joan off to a secretarial bureau that Grand uses, to a derelict building still bombed out from the War, to the hairdresser’s shop that the secretarial contact runs off to in a hurry… It’s like these producers heard the retailing dictum “Location, location, location,” and used it as their philosophy in making this movie, as if a steady stream of shooting locations could make up for deficits in character and plot. In fact, a good percentage of our running time is spent getting from location to location, following either Rossi alone or Rossi and Joan exchanging minimal dialog, and because there’s barely any musical score to this movie, what was supposedly intended as drawn-out suspense looks instead like travelogue filler. By the time we undramatically find out two-thirds of the way through that Rossi is actually an FBI agent, we no longer care; we’ve gone without competent characterization long enough that we’ve given up hope.

“It’s certainly the noiriest beauty parlor I’ve ever seen, I’ll give it that.”

We never do find out what Grand is doing with the kidnapped scientists and engineers. But we end up not caring about that, either. All we care about is, How much more footage of George Raft on foot are we going to see before the closing credits? The answer is, “More than we ever wanted to see.”

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 2
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0