There are two kinds of remakes: the ones you never knew you needed (Ocean’s Eleven, anyone?), and the ones that feel like reheated leftovers on fine china. You Can’t Run Away from It is squarely the latter. A 1956 musical riff on the immortal It Happened One Night (1934), it’s like watching your grandparents try to twerk—earnest, bewildering, and slightly impressive if you squint. Directed by Dick Powell and starring Jack Lemmon and June Allyson (Powell’s wife, bless him), it’s a Technicolor reimagining that’s equal parts charm and cringe, peppered with songs you’ll forget by the time the credits roll.
Hollywood’s Musical Fever Dream
The 1950s were a golden age for musicals—or, depending on your tolerance for spontaneous singing, a fever dream you couldn’t wake up from. Columbia Pictures was knee-deep in this trend, raiding its own vaults for intellectual property to retrofit with jazz hands and toe-tapping numbers. Thus, someone in a polyester suit must’ve squinted at It Happened One Night, slapped a tambourine on the script, and declared, “Let’s do that, but with singing.”
Enter Dick Powell, once a baby-faced crooner turned noir tough guy, now taking a crack at directing. What better way to test the waters than by dragging his real-life wife into a project destined to be compared to a Capra classic? June Allyson, by then pushing 40, was cast as runaway heiress Ellie—a role that had defined Claudette Colbert’s stardom two decades earlier. Powell’s choice reeked of marital diplomacy: either direct your wife or sleep on the couch for the rest of the decade.
A Musical Marriage and One Cold Dunk
Jack Lemmon, eternally boyish and only a few years removed from his Oscar win in Mister Roberts, stepped into Clark Gable’s oversized shoes as Peter Warne, the down-on-his-luck reporter with a moral compass and a taste for headlines (and, evidently, heiresses). Lemmon does Lemmon things—charming, neurotic, a bit too Ivy League to pass for a hardscrabble journalist, but undeniably watchable.
The chemistry between Lemmon and Allyson is… functional. Not sizzling, not dead fish—more like a warm handshake. The production, meanwhile, took them to Arizona’s Lewis Douglas Ranch for a dunking scene that nearly sent Lemmon into hypothermia. They say comedy is pain. Here, comedy was 40-degree water and the looming threat of pneumonia. The film’s numbers—“Thumbin’ a Ride,” “Howdy Friends and Neighbours”—are pleasant but forgettable, like background music in a diner that serves decent pie.
Not Quite a Crash, Not Quite a Classic
Critics weren’t exactly sharpening pitchforks, but they didn’t throw roses either. The film made a modest $1.45 million—a decent haul for something that felt like a karaoke version of an Oscar-winning script. Audiences liked it well enough, likely because the 1950s hadn’t yet developed the modern cynicism needed to side-eye every studio cash grab.
Legacy-wise, You Can’t Run Away from It is remembered less as a film and more as a footnote. It was Dick Powell’s only directorial collaboration with Allyson. Jim Backus—yes, the future Mr. Howell of Gilligan’s Island—played Danker, a character originally portrayed by Alan Hale Sr., whose son would later also land on Gilligan’s Island. That’s the kind of six-degrees-of-separation trivia that gets more interesting than the film itself.
And then there’s the issue of songs. The studio hoped they’d become standards. Instead, they became the kind of tunes your uncle might hum after one too many martinis at a retro-themed wedding.
Like a Cadillac with Clogged Carburetors
In the end, You Can’t Run Away from It is a charming curio—an artifact of a time when Hollywood believed that slapping a musical number on a classic script was as good as progress. It’s worth watching if you’re a Jack Lemmon completist, a June Allyson devotee, or just someone fascinated by the era when remakes were colorful, cautious, and relatively harmless.
Would I run toward it? No. But I wouldn’t run away from it either.
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