The Last Run Details

John Huston started directing this thriller but quit after three weeks; his boozing, meddling with the script and disagreements with star George C Scott led to him being replaced by Richard Fleischer. The result, though, is marvellous. Scott plays a lonely, burned-out gangster who agrees to do one last job — driving Spain's most wanted man and his girlfriend to the border, with the Mob and the police in pursuit. It's a riveting, Hemingway-style story with Scott — in a role that Bogart might have played a decade earlier — playing to perfection a man staring fate straight between the eyes. The Spanish landscape is superbly captured by Ingmar Bergman's cameraman, Sven Nykvist, and Jerry Goldsmith provides a haunting score.