The same exact year British model turned actress Christina Gregg played a fifteen-year-old girl being seduced by a man on a payphone in DON'T TALK TO STRANGE MEN, she was the twenty-something sister of a cutthroat convict who made THE BREAK from a fast-moving train...
Then kills a guard and like the handful of eclectic characters, all wind up... as Quentin Tarantino attempted in HATEFUL EIGHT inspired by John Carpenter's classic THE THING... in the same limited space, here a rural hotel (looking more like a quaint two-story B&B) -- all with not only different personalities and perspectives but purpose and motivation...
Like most of these British thrillers, the leading man is a middle-aged, sophisticated gentlemen type: a famous author with writer's block and, on the upside he quickly yet slowly finds kinship with the gorgeous Christina Gregg but he's also being surreptitiously eyed by the most intriguing and perhaps crooked person onboard in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN Peter Cushing sidekick Robert Urquhart as a wily-charming gumshoe insurance investigator...
So far we've spoiled plenty just by describing certain characters as THE BREAK is totally character and personality driven as that distinguished author, played by Tony Britton, has the strong and able aura of Humphrey Bogart when he'd become a solid cinematic hero while the "titular" escapee/Christina Gregg's brother, William Lucas... with the deliciously tough name of Jocko... is like Bogie in his mean and nasty antagonist-of-Cagney years...
Thus there's pretty much everything going on- - the only mistake is getting rid of one particular mug far too soon while making too big a deal about random and strategic bouts of violence in a movie that should act as tough as it looks, and feels...
Even future STAR WARS general Eddie Byrne, as the shady middleman who'd set up the rudimentary escape, the essential cash and the hidden locale for brother and sister to easily ditch their orphaned/abused past to freedom, loses his experienced cool after our anti-hero turned straight-out villain loses even the trust/faith of little sis -- the latter preferring a safe future to a fierce, edgy one...
As does the film itself - the first half exceeding the second - yet is still pretty terrific in its intentionally claustrophobic setting with dialogue that's never stagey and even an 11th hour outdoors action sequence in a nearby salt mine, where a truck chase is filmed by veteran thriller-auteur Lance Comfort, flowing as smooth as any American action flick years later...
For, like all British New Wave flicks, the acting (including a diamond-in-the-rough religious zealot named Moses) is both feisty and laidback, acute, natural... what the Yanks would catch onto in the following decade as the Brits 1960's was our 1970's.
Then kills a guard and like the handful of eclectic characters, all wind up... as Quentin Tarantino attempted in HATEFUL EIGHT inspired by John Carpenter's classic THE THING... in the same limited space, here a rural hotel (looking more like a quaint two-story B&B) -- all with not only different personalities and perspectives but purpose and motivation...
Like most of these British thrillers, the leading man is a middle-aged, sophisticated gentlemen type: a famous author with writer's block and, on the upside he quickly yet slowly finds kinship with the gorgeous Christina Gregg but he's also being surreptitiously eyed by the most intriguing and perhaps crooked person onboard in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN Peter Cushing sidekick Robert Urquhart as a wily-charming gumshoe insurance investigator...
So far we've spoiled plenty just by describing certain characters as THE BREAK is totally character and personality driven as that distinguished author, played by Tony Britton, has the strong and able aura of Humphrey Bogart when he'd become a solid cinematic hero while the "titular" escapee/Christina Gregg's brother, William Lucas... with the deliciously tough name of Jocko... is like Bogie in his mean and nasty antagonist-of-Cagney years...
Thus there's pretty much everything going on- - the only mistake is getting rid of one particular mug far too soon while making too big a deal about random and strategic bouts of violence in a movie that should act as tough as it looks, and feels...
Even future STAR WARS general Eddie Byrne, as the shady middleman who'd set up the rudimentary escape, the essential cash and the hidden locale for brother and sister to easily ditch their orphaned/abused past to freedom, loses his experienced cool after our anti-hero turned straight-out villain loses even the trust/faith of little sis -- the latter preferring a safe future to a fierce, edgy one...
As does the film itself - the first half exceeding the second - yet is still pretty terrific in its intentionally claustrophobic setting with dialogue that's never stagey and even an 11th hour outdoors action sequence in a nearby salt mine, where a truck chase is filmed by veteran thriller-auteur Lance Comfort, flowing as smooth as any American action flick years later...
For, like all British New Wave flicks, the acting (including a diamond-in-the-rough religious zealot named Moses) is both feisty and laidback, acute, natural... what the Yanks would catch onto in the following decade as the Brits 1960's was our 1970's.