Although No Escape is of higher quality that most of [Sonny] Tufts's fare, he turns in his usual bad performance, and the rest of the cast, though competent, cannot rescue a movie that is slow paced and wordy.
--Arthur Lyons, Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir (Da Capo, 2000)
I don't care much one way or the other about Sonny Tufts but I like Lew Ayres, who took a big risk with his career by registering as a conscientious objector in WWII and served as a medic in the Pacific. He did make a few movies after the war; I particularly admire his effectively low-key role as the Vice-President in Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962). Ayres has the lead role in No Escape as a washed-up dipsomaniac songwriter on the lam from a murder charge with co-star Marjorie Steele, in the last of her four movie roles.
I recommend this film for those who, like the late Gore Vidal, think the writer of the script is the true "author" of a film. No Escape is one of the two films that Bennett directed (Madness of the Heart, 1949, was the other) after writing a number of excellent films, including Hitchcock's 39 Steps (1935) and Sabotage (1936). Bennett's script for No Escape could have made an excellent film, with the theme of the innocent man on the run so common in Hitchcock, if it had been better and more intelligently directed, the film alternating between claustrophobic sets and shots of San Francisco obviously shot by a second unit.
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