User Reviews

NOWHERE TO RUN is an odd little character study TV movie from 1978. The presence of David Janssen as the protagonist is appropriate given the title and his fame for appearing in THE FUGITIVE. Janssen plays a miserable character, downtrodden by his wife, who decides to fake his own death and disappear in order to begin a new life; much like in THE FALL AND RISE OF REGINALD PERRIN. The astonishing thing is that Janssen's plan takes no less than 15 years to achieve fruition! That this works at all is down to the unusual nature of the story, which explores a kind of situation you don't normally see play out on screen, alongside Janssen's hugely sympathetic chief performance.

David Janssen seems about the best choice for playing Harry Adams, a lonely, but brilliant structural engineer in a loveless marriage. It might be possible to accumulate $500,000 in high-stakes black jack playing, being able to do it in 15 years or less. In fact, a BJ card counting team went into Resorts International Casino, around 1978, in Atlantic City and won $145,000 in a period of ~8-9 days and was barred.

The only thing is, I don't think any BJ player would be allowed to bring a notepad to a BJ table. This might be construed as a form of card-counting, yet was necessary for the plot.

When Herbie, the Private Investigator, needed $10,000 to pay off his gambling debts, why didn't Harry (Janssen) simply remove the $10,000 from the nearly $500,000 in BJ winnings that he had already amassed, instead of getting involved in a rather dangerous, high-stakes, back room poker game? Much simpler. To me, $490,000 would be close enough.

Possibly the most abysmally plotted melodrama I have ever seen. It plays like three separate movies all stitched together.

In the first movie, an SF-based structural engineer and JFK-aficionado (David Janssen), married to cold fish Stephanie Powers, embarks on a 12 year plan to win half a million dollars using his foolproof blackjack system, fake his own death, and start a new life overseas. Or something.

Along the way, Janssen's wife hires a loser PI to keep tabs on Jannsen. Janssen and the loser PI become fast friends (don't ask), and Jannsen uses his cardsharp skills to help the loser PI get out of debt to the mob. That's movie #2.

In movie #3, Jannsen successfully fakes his own death and disappears, after which his "widow" Powers goes on to marry her longtime boyfriend (yep, all this time, Powers was cheating on Jannsen) and in the final 15 minutes, Jannsen and his new love, Linda Evans, board a plane to Israel THAT IS IMMEDIATELY OVERTAKEN BY HIJACKERS.

You read that right.

So, insane, disjointed plotting.

Good actors spouting okay lines under the guidance of a skilled director. But the story lets everyone down. Including the viewer.

After reading the other users' comments, I was eager to watch this one. A copy was recently uploaded on YouTube. I think David Janssen's a fascinating actor, and I hadn't seen anything from the end of his career. But if these were the kinds of scripts he was getting at the end, I shudder to think what he would have been saddled with in the next decade, had he lived and continued acting.

This TV movie has an interesting premise. I didn't have a problem with the basic scenario, about a man wanting to get away from an unappreciative wife. But the way the scenario was handled was quite dumb and drawn out. At some points, it's like the writer couldn't decide if it should be a domestic drama about the wife (Stefanie Powers) and her parents, and the wife's affair. Or if it should be about Janssen becoming an expert blackjack player. We were not told till later that his skill at the game is what helped him afford his new life, but that seemed fairly obvious.

The scenes with Janssen and the detective playing cards and beating the other players had amusing moments, but took up way too much screen time. More time should instead have been devoted to how Janssen staged his death. A lot of that was done off-camera with him explaining it later to the detective. Why? It should have been presented on screen.

The stuff with his continual references to Kennedy and the day JFK was shot seemed overdone. It was an interesting gimmick that was repeated too many times to retain effectiveness. Eventually we had the wife complaining about her husband's obsession over a dead president. It was like she was speaking for viewers who were thinking 'enough already, now let's get on with the story.'

Overall this was a TV movie that had interesting ideas, but much of it was just that-- ideas without a real coherent story. The scenes with Linda Evans, who played Janssens' new lady love in the last half hour, just seemed like filler. We had an interminable sequence where they were on a hijacked plane. All of that felt like it belonged in another movie altogether.

As for Janssen himself, he's the main reason to watch this TV movie. His acting is always good, even when he's underserved by the material. I also thought Stefanie Powers did well, playing against type as a shrew. But in some scenes, it felt like Powers and Evans were too young to play opposite Janssen. It was clear that Janssen had really aged near the end of his life. He doesn't look like he's 46, he looks 66.