Total Sci-Fi’s Guide to the Incredibly Strange and Obscure in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Movies

The Facts

Written by Robert Clouse
Directed by Darren McGavin
Produced by Darren McGavin
Music: Don Vincent
Cast: Ron Howard, Patricia Neal, Cloris Leachman, Bobby Darin, Tessa Dahl, Kathie Browne, Simon Oakland, Thayer David
Running time: 91 minutes
Also Known As: Happy Mother’s Day, Love George

The Plot

Drifter Johnny arrives in his old New England fishing village home searching for his long lost mother at a time of mysterious disappearances and strange murders.

The Lowdown


Ron Howard starred in this little known movie (directed by TV’s Kolchak, Darren McGavin) the same year as George Lucas’s American Graffiti. Run, Stranger, Run is an early entry in the ‘weird town’ genre epitomized by Peyton Place and Twin Peaks and that has seen a revival recently in Haven, Eureka and Happy Town.

Howard is Johnny, arriving in an idyllic New England fishing village in search of his long estranged mother and unidentified father. He runs into a series of odd characters, including Psycho’s Simon Oakland as the local sheriff and Tessa Dahl, a repressed, lonely girl keen to seduce him but unsure how (just as well, given their eventual family connections). Bizarrely, Dahl uses her own English accent, explained in a throwaway line that her father taught her to talk that way!

There are strange psycho-sexual undercurrents to many of the characters and situations in Run, Stranger, Run, but it is the varied and oddball cast that makes Darren McGavin’s only directorial effort interesting. The Day The Earth Stood Still’s husky voiced Patricia Neal hams it up in true Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? style (especially close to the end), while Cloris Leachman (the grandmother in Malcolm in the Middle) plays Howard’s mother, and even Dark Shadows veteran Thayer David pops up as the local minister.

Also in the cast list you’ll find McGavin’s wife, Kathie Browne, while Tessa Dahl is also Neal’s daughter by author Roald Dahl. Singer Bobby Darin appears as Johnny’s mother’s boyfriend.

Initially released under the title Happy Mother’s Day, Love George, McGavin’s film was re-titled and re-released as Run, Stranger, Run. It’s definitely a slow-burn that takes its time to build to anything dramatic, but in the way of ‘weird town’ dramas this is more about the characters and odd atmosphere than action. Before the final credits, however, corpses turn up everywhere. Four people have gone missing, and there are two skeletons under the beach, bodies in the guest bedroom, hidden in the front yard and among the fishing nets, as well as one in the bath and one in the garage!

Everything comes to a head in the last half hour in which McGavin does his best work and the viewer’s patience is finally rewarded with a rich maladjusted family gothic horror story. Attentive viewers will not be surprised at who the culprit is eventually revealed to be, but the trip through Run, Stranger, Run is certainly a strange one, populated by an odd and eclectic cast. It’s an interesting merging of social realism with gothic horror.


Cult Cast

Ron Howard is best known these days as a director (Splash, Cocoon, Apollo 13, The Da Vinci Code), but he of course started off as an actor (The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days). He starred in Eat My Dust for producer Roger Corman so he could direct Grand Theft Auto (1977). Howard has always had a strong interest in SF, fantasy and horror (as seen in his directorial projects) and has plans to adapt Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series for film and television.

Patricia Neal was the female lead in The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) and was married to author Roald Dahl for 30 years. Model and actress Sophie Dahl is Neal’s granddaughter. She appeared in few fantasy movies, but one of the exceptions was Ghost Story (1981).

Director’s Cut

Darren McGavin is best known as supernatural investigator Kolchak in the TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. He also appeared in the TV mini-series of The Martian Chronicles (1981) and The X-Files (as Arthur Dales, the man who originated the X-Files, a homage to his Kolchak role). He also played the father of Frank Black on Chris Carter’s other series, Millennium. McGavin even briefly appeared — digitally — in an episode of the 2005 Kolchak remake series, The Night Stalker. He died in 2006, aged 83.

WTF? Moment

About 30 minutes in a child uncovers a body while playing on the beach. Apparently not at all shaken or surprised by this, the kid blithely sweeps sand back over the skull and continues building sand castles — it’s one of the few early signifiers that everything is not right in this town. Later, the discovery of cat bones might remind certain viewers of another Cult Movie Vault entry, Spider Baby.

Behind-the-Scenes

Among the oddities in this film is the preponderance of Italian character names. This is a hangover from the original story that saw the character of Johnny travel from the East coast to Sausalito, near San Francisco, which has a large Italian population. When the direction of travel changed and Johnny journeyed East to New England, the names remained the same! Prior to shooting the film, Patricia Neal had suffered a stroke, so had trouble remembering her lines. Cue cards hidden around the set helped her manage.


Creators Talk

“[In] 1972, I made a film in Canada set on the East Coast. We actually filmed it in a little town called Lunenburg, which many years previously had been quite an important seaport, 50 miles from Halifax, Nova Scotia. The director told me once how the money had been raised for this film. He’d met some rich banker on a beach in the Bahamas, and they'd come up with this very, very simple scheme: one in six movies pays off, so all you have to do is make six movies, and one of them will pay for all the failures! They set off with that idea, and this was the first movie to be made. While Johnny’s looking for his mother, there’s a serial killer around in the town. It was a fairly happy shoot.” — Cinematographer Walter Lassally, B.S.C., www.webofstories.com/play/14148

Availability

Completely unavailable commercially: even the long ago released VHS (under the title Run, Stranger, Run) has been deleted.

Online Resources

See cinematographer Walter Lassally discuss the film
[www.webofstories.com/play/14148]

Remake

There might be some potential for a remake of this, but it does have a 1970s Play Misty for Me vibe that would need to be updated. However, the TV series Haven has pretty much claimed this territory for the 21st Century.

The Bottom Line

It may not be the flashiest movie ever made, but Run, Stranger, Run is a genuine oddity, full of quirky reasons for viewing it at least once.

Brian J. Robb