The Insuranceman Cometh

The Running Man. The funeral service is over. The pretty young widow (Lee Remick) stares at her desolate parlor. All at once she buries her face in her hands and gives way to gentle sobs. The last of the mourners leaves. As the door slams, she lifts her face out of her hands, and the audience sees that the pretty young widow is not sobbing at all--she is laughing!

She is laughing because her husband (Laurence Harvey) is not dead. He pops in the front door, hangs a big fat buss on her happy face, tells her to come collect him as soon as she collects the insurance money, pops out the front door, hops a plane to Spain. Three months later, she hops one too. They meet in Malaga, two gay young things who propose to live happily ever after on their ill-got gains. After all, he reassures her, they haven't really committed a crime; they have simply enforced their rightful claim upon an insurance company that legally but shabbily evaded payment when the husband's plane crashed. But it won't wash. The heroine feels secretly guilty, and the hero is strangely changed by the experience of crime and the temptations of affluence.

One day, inevitably, he looks across the bubbles and sees--yikes, it's an agent (Alan Bates) from the insurance company! Is the agent merely what he says he is: a man on vacation? Or is he really playing cat-and-mouse with the culprits? If so, the hero decides grimly, two can play at a game. So can three, and Director Carol Reed (The Third Man) is pretty hard to beat. The tension builds nicely, the shocks come pat when they're supposed to, and the last reel combines irony, scenery and the internal-combustion engine in a getaway with get up and get.

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