RUN FOR THE SUN (1956)

Mike Latimer (Richard Widmark), a famous author and man's man—think Hemingway—has vanished, on purpose. Magazine reporter Katie Connors (Jane Greer) has traced him to San Marcos, a small Mexican village and, posing as a tourist, engineers a meet-cute in an attempt to get a good story. Over several days, he spills his guts to her about his ex-wife's infidelity, and his depression over his writer's block. An attraction grows, and Katie decides to head back to New York but not turn in her story. Mike offers to fly her to Mexico City but a compass malfunction causes them to get lost. When their fuel runs out, they crash land on the wooded, isolated property of an Englishman named Browne (Trevor Howard) and his Dutch brother-in-law Anders (Peter van Eyck) who claim to be archeologists studying nearby ruins. But really, they are Nazis in hiding: Browne was a notorious anti-British radio propagandist and Anders was responsible for the massacre of an entire village. Mike finds out that Katie was writing a story on him and feels betrayed, not quite believing that she had given it up, but when it becomes clear that the two men will not let them rejoin civilization, they join forces to make a run through the jungle to escape. With the two Nazis hot on their trail, how far will they get?

This is billed as an adaptation of Richard Connell's famous short story "The Most Dangerous Game" in which a madman hunts humans for sport, but that plotline is non-existent here—more faithful adaptations were done in 1932 and 1945. This is basically a decent romantic melodrama that turns into an action thriller in its latter half. The characters are much more rounded and interesting than those in the other Dangerous Game movies, and the splitting of the sinister hunter into two people is interesting as some tension develops between them concerning their differing hopes for the future. Widmark isn't my idea of Hemingway but he grew on me; Greer, pictured with Widmark, is attractive but her character is the least developed of the four; Howard and van Eyck take the acting honors here, managing to portray the Nazis as human and not just cardboard villains. The setting is appropriately menacing, though some bad day-for-night photography spoils the tension at times. As a version of the Connell story, not so much, but on its own terms as a melodrama potboiler, not bad. [TCM]