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Copyright Statement - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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347<br />

scenes, notably the very difficult one when he tries to cover up his failure to rescue<br />

the girl when she is likely to drown – it’s a vital scene and it doesn’t come off.” 48<br />

(Colin Broadley, recalling the technical problems involved in the lake scene, wryly<br />

commented years later, “I didn’t like the scene and neither did the critics”). 49<br />

Reviewing in some detail a cross section of Runaway’s actors, the Listener noted that<br />

“the surprising thing, really, is that the film holds together so well in spite of its<br />

numerous apparently inexperienced players. But they do weaken it”. The film, by<br />

this stage, had been on the nation’s cinema screens for two weeks. Consequently the<br />

reviewer was able to draw on the opinions of others and cited the “remark of a<br />

perceptive friend who had seen it several times, that Runaway is really an Englishspeaking<br />

continental film”. Unfortunately the reviewer did not expand on this useful<br />

suggestion, but did praise aspects that fitted this model such as the “bold opening<br />

[and] Anthony Williams’s quite brilliant and finely imaginative photography”. Also,<br />

Maconie’s music was praised for being “always apt and never intrusive”. Merit was<br />

even seen in the sparseness of the dialogue which ensured “that the film never drags”.<br />

(Many other reviewers had been irritated by the Antonioni-style silences.) The final<br />

paragraph of the review was particularly unusual in its attempt to empathise with<br />

Manning and the film’s moral philosophy:<br />

It remains to the end sympathetic to its young New Zealander, who is running<br />

away from his past and a way of life with which he feels at odds, and trying to<br />

find himself a new, free life and perhaps even the lost innocence of his<br />

boyhood, breaks the law or the accepted moral code at every turn of the road.<br />

How can you wish him ill as punishment for what he has done? The girl asks<br />

his pursuers near the end. You don’t know him. 50<br />

Perhaps the most thoughtful review, especially in relating the film to New Zealand<br />

culture, was by P.J. Downey, President of the Wellington Film Society and a<br />

fortnightly film reviewer for 2YA radio, who wrote about Runaway in the magazine A<br />

New Zealand Quarterly Review. His analysis was lengthy and detailed, written with<br />

the knowledge that one would expect of a man with a thoughtful interest in film as an<br />

art form. From the beginning he placed Runaway in the context of film-making in<br />

New Zealand at that time.

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