A GUNMAN HAS ESCAPED. Monarch Films, UK, 1948. John Harvey, John Fitzgerald, Robert Cartland, Ernest Brightmore, Maria Charles, Jane Arden, Frank Hawkins. Scenario: John Gilling. Director: Richard M. Grey.

   Sometimes films have more to offer in terms of historical interest than any entertainment value they may or may not have. In all honesty, if anyone could call this late 40s low budget crime drama from England anything more than mediocre, I’d have to consider their critical judgment something between low and none.

   But consider the date. For most of the players in this movie, the war was barely over and this was the beginning of long careers for them, mostly in TV when that came along, but movies as well. In fact one of them, Maria Charles, who plays a gun moll named Goldie and whose first movie this was, is still alive at the age of 86 and was on TV as recently as 2009.

   The director (and producer) of A Gunman Has Escaped, Richard M. Grey, made one or two other films then disappeared, and so did his production company. Perhaps the most well known of the actors was Jane Arden, whose second film this was, later became a noted film director, actress, screenwriter, playwright, songwriter, and poet. (You can follow the link to a long Wikipedia entry on her.)

   In this movie, though, she plays an unmarried and very naive farmer’s daughter who falls in love with one of three gunmen who botched a jewelry robbery, killing a bystander in the process, and who are now on the lam, and who take refuge on her father’s farm.

   This is a very short film, well under an hour in running time, and although almost all the violence is offstage, quite a brutal one. The actors all know their lines, though, and although the story is nothing more than perfunctory — I’ve told you all there is to know — I never had the urge to turn it off while I was watching.