If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Excellent adaptation.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Three men on the run after a botched robbery that ended with a man being shot take refuge in a farm, being taken in by a kindly farmer who needs help with his smallholding. The men are leader Eddie Steele who is a tough and hardened criminal, Sinclair who is a poetry quoting felon unwillingly going along with Eddie and weedy Bill Grant who inevitably falls in love with the father's daughter. After the gang's guilt is discovered the film climaxes quite violently in a London gangster's house.A low budget film that just about keeps one's attention. The acting is rather bland and so are the settings. For me Jane Arden as Jane the farmer's daughter stood out in the cast. The film had promise but didn't rise above the routine. Also acting in it is Manville Tarrant which I only mention because it is such an actor-ly name.

Written by later British horror movie regular John Gilling, A Gunman Has Escaped is a tatty time-waster dating from 1948, though technically it certainly feels as though it was made significantly earlier than that. Obviously 'inspired' by such films as Odd Man Out and Brighton Rock (both 1947), it is a real oddity in that the cast seems to lack any recognisable faces, the story is essentially devoid of incident, and the acting comes across as real repertory theatre-standard stuff. Lead John Harvey gives a music hall-style impersonation of a 'cockney geezer' as a thuggish crook who accidentally shoots a member of the public during a robbery, and has to go on the run with a pair of accomplices; fleeing to the countryside 'somewhere up north', the trio's cover is blown by a salt-of-the-earth farmer in record time (mainly down to the fact that they seem to try and behave as shiftily as possible), before Harvey's moronic ringleader heads back to London for a showdown with the gang boss he thinks has grassed him up...I didn't recognise Harvey at all when I was watching the movie, though a quick glance at his filmography shows that he actually had minor parts in Hitchcock thrillers (Stage Fright), Hammer flicks (X the Unknown, The Satanic Rites of Dracula), comedies (Private's Progress, Double Bunk), and a whole host of UK TV shows in a career lasting over forty years. Though not helped here by the somewhat dodgy editing and ropey sound quality, his performance certainly feels artificial (I'm no expert, but I'm certain murderous London gangsters wouldn't have been any more likely to use the word 'perisher' in 1948 as they are in 2016), and it is by no means the worst or most incongruous one in the picture. As posh boy army deserter Sinclair, John Fitzgerald seems to be trying to channel Leslie Howard in The Petrified Forest, his performance consisting of nothing but florid, inappropriate Shakespeare quotes and defeatist wisecracks, whilst the rest of the cast are mainly forgettable (that said though, a bit-part player called Frank Hawkins isn't bad as the canny farmer).The work of a director named Richard M. Grey, who appears to have made hardly anything else, this minor effort's fate as having gone unseen for several decades is not particularly surprising. A museum piece from British cinema's archives that endures only for the academic interest it might hold for film scholars, there is essentially no entertainment value here for the casual viewer of today.

Unknown cast but very much out of line with the rather limp fare of the era - presumably due to precautionary caution of the director or producer - the violence is graphic even when off-camera. With its BBC radio "police announcement" seeking witnesses to the crime, it conjures up a time when gun crime was comparatively rare and all the more shocking - and the certainty of the rope the grim reward. The track in to the gangster moll's face - watchful with a slight smile - as someone is beaten and probably killed just off camera was a surprising escapee from the censor's scissors. Not remotely in the same class as Brighton Rock but it's equally shocking.Thank you to Talking Pictures for showing it.

This film seems to have been made on an ultra low budget. The story concerns a gang of robbers,where the leader shoots and kills a passer who tried to intervene. When they return to their hideout the leader decides that all 3 of them must do a runner.They go out into the countryside and hijack a van.They find a farm where they get work and one of the gang falls for the farmers daughter.However locals become suspicious and they have to flee.However one of the robbers wants to go back to London,and he is shot by the leader.He and the other gang member go back to London.At their hideout a lot of shooting takes place and the police finally arrive when the dust has settled.All rather second rate