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The Roman Catholic newspaper Zealandia began its review sympathetically,
describing the film as “an artistic piece of entertainment which does credit to its
producer and director, John O’Shea and his small team of actors and technicians”. As
with other reviewers, the paper found “the major fault in the story is in the script. It
tends to be too sparse and stilted giving artificial feeling to some of the
conversations”. Curiously the reviewer found fault with the realism of some of the
locations, arguing that “the opening scenes at David’s office … suffer an air of
unreality because they lack convincing sets”. With the actors described at best as
“competent”, it was once again the camerawork that received the accolades. “It was
the photography which held my attention from the beginning to the end. The
temptation to use colour must have been considerable. Instead there is some
magnificent black and white photography which gives film a rare quality. Fact and
fantasy melt in together through a series of symbolic pictures of New Zealand
scenery.” Although disappointed that “there was little build up to the climaxes
through the film when David is escaping”, the reviewer enjoyed “the majesty of the
Alps and the stirring organ music in the final scenes [that] brings the film to a moving
but inevitable end”. The review’s conclusion typified the verdict of many local
reviewers: “An artistic piece of New Zealand cinema with some beautiful black and
white photography, but hampered by a poor script.” 36 It also typified the curious
silence of reviewers about what the film had to say about New Zealand. A review in a
Catholic paper might well have attacked Runaway for its existential sense of
amorality. The fact that it focused on the film as art and entertainment – rather than
as moral fable – was in one sense a generous reaction, but in another sense it raised a
disturbing question. Were local reviewers unwilling to confront the film’s
provocative vision of New Zealand, or had the film-makers simply failed to provoke?
Advance publicity had strongly suggested that Runaway would be an adventure film
mixed with romance and erotic titillation. Due to its need to recoup as much of its
costs as possible from the local box office, Runaway was marketed as a mainstream
adventure film. Had the publicity prepared viewers for a New Zealand version of
L’Avventura, or a film about an existentialist-style rebel, reviewers would have
approached it with a clearer framework, but audience numbers would have shrunk,
especially in the smaller cities and towns. As it was, even the most discerning critics
made no reference to symbolic implications for New Zealand. Nevertheless,