A tight little noir set in California that gallops along at terrific speed. Doctor Condon (Craig Hill) runs an all night medical center and seems to be unacquainted with the types that show up there. In the middle of the night, some gangsters and their goons drop off a smashed-up detective, who promptly dies on the Doc’s table. The Doc then delivers the corpse to the police, confirming his position as eye witness for the murder and signing his own death warrant with the bad guys in one fell swoop, the idiot.
The Doc gets spooked when his armed police protection gets shot by the thugs (who wouldn’t?) and decides to take things into his own hands by getting the heck out of Dodge.
Fast forward a year later and the Doc has thankfully cut his blond dye job and settled down as a clerk in Summit City, a quaint Western town in the mountains of Northern California. It’s a town that runs on hunting money, so don’t let the deserted streets fool you. In one week, the sheriff informs us, the town will be swamped with hunters—fish in the summer and deer in the winter.
Doc Condon has settled down restocking shelves instead of sewing sutures, and he lives in Ye Olde Hunting Lodge with a Korean War vet and his charming daughter, still unmarried and hovering the drain of spinsterhood.
We step back into the action as Laurie (Elaine Anderson) is getting annoyed at the run-around Doc Condon gives her as she increasingly tries to wheedle her way into his world and out of singledom for good. He, of course, is petrified of getting gunned down by a hit man at any moment, and bides his time watching the papers for signs that the craven gangster Craven will blow his cover and get himself arrested.
Craven is also laying low, and is also cooped up in a hotel room with his poor moll, who takes the brunt of his frustration and pent-up anxiety and, for some unknown reason, sticks around.
And the doubling doesn’t stop there. What You Have to Run Fast does more than anything else is show its audience how blurred the line between good guy and bad guy can get.
Of course, Craven’s thugs find our poor Doc, who has had to reveal himself as a medical man to save a friend and who’s already spilled the beans to his would-be wife and her wheelchair-bound dad (legs blown off in Korea, been waiting patiently with a rifle on his lap for his comeuppance).
Now the good guys and bad guys are swarming Summit City, as well as the hunters, all wearing very similar (especially in black and white) hunting plaids. And the film’s title is absolutely correct—you have to run fast to avoid those flying bullets, especially in the low cover provided by the the Sierra Nevada’s rocky foothills, which is where the pot shots really fly in the final scene. The final shoot out is quick and good, with both leads–Craven and Condon–giving in to their true characters.
Laurie and her pops have some fun too—Pops gets to shoot at bad guys again and Laurie no longer has to face life as a spinster, bless her heart. Now she’s found herself quite a man in the fella who dropped into town out of the blue, lied about his identity for 12 months, is actively being chased by criminal elements, and there’s more. But at least he’s a doctor! Daddy approved.
This taut film is quick and brutal, with some solid acting and a satisfying ending. More than anything, I liked the blistering pace. Even though director Cahn and writer Hampton swapped the dusty streets of Tombstone for snow-clad tors of the Sierras doesn’t make You Have to Run Fast any less a Western, where matters must be taken into one’s own hands and sometimes you find out you’re the bad guy after all.
- Marshall Highet