I first encountered The Last Run by way of a late-night ʼ80s airing on my black-and-white portable. I remember being amazed that such an obscure old car – a BMW 503 Cabriolet – was centre stage in this 1971 road trip. Short on laughs, with a downbeat balalaika theme tune that lets you know from the start things arenʼt going to end well, it is the story of an aged Chicago gangster (George C Scott) who, having retired to a Portuguese fishing village, comes out of retirement for one last job: smuggling an escaped convict into Italy. Scott supplies the wheels, which we see being lovingly fettled by our antihero in the opening scenes.
Fresh from the success of Patton, the hard-drinking Scott was after a moody, Humphrey Bogart-style role. He spends most of the filmʼs 96 mins brooding behind dark glasses, looking suitably rugged in a battered old flying jacket, with a fag clamped firmly between his teeth.
By the end of filming, Scott had chopped in his then-wife, Colleen Dewhurst, for his leading lady, Trish Van Devere, to whom he was still married when he died in 1999 at 71 years old.
With John Houston directing initially, there were plenty of big egos on a set where the only thing anybody appeared to agree on was that they hated the script. The only Houston shots that make the final cut are those of Scott tuning the 503, with a timing light and a tube down the Solex carbs to get the right degree of ʻsuckʼ. This effectively conveys that the car is the only thing in his life he cares about, but watching actors pretending to work on cars makes me cringe.
The Last Run was part of a four-film MGM-EMI deal that included Get Carter, but had the feel of those co-operative Euro-gangster flicks where half the cast are overdubbed by someone who has been gargling with broken glass, although it was really a cut above those productions.
Luckily, the car is in almost every scene, the best a dusty sequence where Scott and co-stars are chased by rival hoods in a white XJ6 (maybe a 2.8, given its inability to overhaul the 503). While the BMW drifts round every curve on its skinny rubber, the Jag is driven with overstated incompetence. It even changes from left- to right-hand drive as it slews around the idyllic mountain passes before careering into a ravine, echoing that other doomed white Jaguar saloon sequence used in so many ITC productions.
All the while, our escaped baddie hides in a secret compartment behind the 503ʼs rear seat. One plo
