Hugh O'Brian stars as what you would expect him to be playing: a straight-shooter, solid citizen, ready to save any damsel in distress who might come his way. But "Runaway" proves to be quite interesting under its conventional surface story, loaded with subtexts and areas worth investigating.
Title character is played by Joey Heatherton, still in her teenage persona as a girl from Frisco who's runaway from home and become dependent upon a ne'er-do-well folk singer named Richie. We don't get to meet Richie until the final reel, but he serves as the story's MacGuffin, central to the other characters.
What emerges is a conventional crime story, hardly The Maltese Falcon, but still about stolen merchandise everyone's hunting for, and resolved neatly, a bit too neatly in that busy final reel. Richie turns out to be an unsavory character and Berkeley Harris (a journeyman TV player) overacts poorly in the role.
What I found fascinating is the structure of the piece with four actresses surrounding O'Brian, all blonde (various shades) and each emblematic. Joey is not a sex symbol or Lolita for a change, but rather a misguided youngster who finds a father figure in Hugh. Her highlight is a direct-sound singing in bed of a folk song "Follow Me" that is brief but poignant. That song recurs late in the show when Donna Anderson sings it at a folk club and turns out to be another girlfriend of Richie who holds some key information to the mystery about him. Joey is a hopeful girl while Donna is cyncial.
Yet a third folksinge is played by a real one: Nancy Ames, who brings instant authenticity to the story's milieu, performing at The Mill, a Chicago folk club run by Hugh. The fourth blonde is played by Ellen Burstyn, styled remarkably (and convicngly enacted by the future legend) as a glamorous sex symbol in the role of Hugh's clinging ex-wife, carrying a torch for him. I've neve seen her before in this type of role, it's a revelation from Burstyn's dues-paying erly career where she never eemed to get a break in show biz.
The story's villains are played as father and son by Keenan Wynn and the stalwart leading man of many a softcore sex movie of the period, John Alderman. They provide the story's violence, but it is watered down. And a key factor here is that O'Brian, as handsome and virile as a TV star ("Wyatt Earp") of the time can get, plays something of an asexual character. He's not attracted to young Joey, but instantly paternal to her, and despite Ellen's insistent, clinging behavior, he doesn't want any part of her and seems to be living a monastic existence post-divorce. There's nothing subtle in the script but it adds up to plenty of unspoken complexities, particularly regarding how the women (apart from Ames playing Ames) are so negatively dependent on men, both good (Hugh) and bad (Richie) ones.
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