Martin BUCKLEY

‘While the BMW drifts round every curve, the chasing Jaguar XJ6 is driven with overstated incompetence’

I first encountered The Last Run by way of a late-night '80s airing on my blackand-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 aren't 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 harddrinking Scott was after a moody, Humphrey Bogart-style role. He spends most of the film's 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.