Runaway

He was a young man in a hungry hurry – his blood on fire’, bluffed the ad campaign for New Zealand’s first road move, John O’Shea’s Runaway, and that was where the resemblance to American moviemaking ended. The kiwi Angry Young Man of 1964 is actually a much cooler customer. David Manning (the handsome, fair and fine-featured Colin Broadley) is a yachting, nightclubbing young blade about Auckland who gets caught ‘borrowing’ from his employer, and hits the road north. In the Hokianga he divides his time between the gentle courtship of a gauche and lovely young Kiri Te Kanawa, and toy boy duties with the bored and dangerous young Euro-trash wife of the local big noise. (The sultry Nadja Regin’s credits included From Russia with Love). When this gets too much there’s only one direction left: south to his roots, via Wellington and Christchurch and into the icy clutches of the Alps. In a mountain hut waits the nemesis of any sensitive lad: Barry Crump. —Bill Gosden