JLRMovieReviews Barbara Stawyck, Robert Ryan, and David Farrar star in "Escape to Burma," an escapist over-the-top adventure. We open in court and the king is throwing his weight around, telling David Farrar to find Robert Ryan, who has been identified as the one who shot the prince. From the get go, I couldn't stop laughing at the music. It all seemed like an Arabian music video. After ten minutes or so, it got serious and David went on his way through the jungle and vast lands to get his man, and we see Robert Ryan battling the brush (on a stage set, maybe) to run from the law. Along the way, he meets Barbara and makes a conquest. After falling for him, she decided he couldn't possibly be as mean as he's purported to be. So she defends him. Will she fight for her man to the death? Is Robert wrongfully accused? While the film does manage to keep your attention in this anything-can-happen (and will) unintentionally funny and campy film, it still feels like an embarrassment to all considered and is far from the best material that any of the stars have been in. (By the way, anyone looking for quicksand, crocodiles and piranhas won't get them here.) If you love obvious eye-candy adventures, then this is a quick fix for you with no thinking involved.

JoeytheBrit My word, what a lot of old tosh this is. Barbara Stanwyck, languishing deep in the Burmese jungles with just a bunch of superstitious natives and a herd of old elephants for company, finds herself playing hostess to a fugitive Robert Ryan. Ryan's on the run from a dour David Farrar who is convinced he murdered the local rajah's son. Of course it's not long before Stanwyck's swooning in Ryan's arms – that leisurely once-over she gives him when they first meet leaves us in no doubt as to where their relationship will lead, and although Farrar is on the side of the law, he's essentially the bad guy because – guess what? – Ryan didn't kill the Rajah's boy after all! Well, actually he did, but it was a sort of mercy killing, so it doesn't count.Stanwyck's still looked in pretty good shape here – although she doesn't look quite so good when standing next to her young native girl servant if you know what I mean. The decent work must have been running out for her by then though, because although the story is reasonably entertaining, the dialogue is almost laughable – especially in the first few minutes when Stanwyck is looking over her rag-tag legion of elephants. Early on, she's portrayed as this strong, independent woman, off hunting a tiger to ease the natives' nerves, but instead of shooting the tiger she falls over and has to be rescued by big butch Bob and after that she just melts.

Hotstar Escape to Burma is just one of a series of adventure features starring the estimable Barbara Stanwyck. However, where this film stands out above many of her other pictures from this period is that the supporting cast can actually act.In fact, the male actors Robert Ryan and David Farrar, are so good in their roles as outlaw and law enforcer that they almost overshadow the matriarch Stanwyck herself. Almost.Escape to Burma is standard Hollywood fare, but entertaining nevertheless; ideal for a rainy day. There are much worse ways to spend 85 minutes.

Alice Liddel It is one of the cliches of mainstream Hollywood cinema that the desire of the hero is limited to two options - a good girl (marriage, security, family, society), and a bad girl (lust, transgression). In this scenario, women are barely people at all, more embodiments of Law and Desire, the socially acceptable and unacceptable. Not the least of this brilliant film's achievements is the way it transfers this cliche to the heroine, making it new and strange. It is the two male characters who represent the two options open to the woman - Robert Ryan is the outlaw, suspected murderer and jewel thief, sexually direct; David Farrer is the policeman, punctiliously obeisant to the law, sexually repressed. Ryan hasn't stepped foot in Barbara Stanwyk's elephant ranch before he's made himself at home, made her frankly voracious and got her talking about 'marriage', which we suspect has little to do with religious ceremonies. Farrer no sooner arrives then he wants to take a man home with him. The film's most striking scene occurs near the climax, in the symbolic space of an abandoned, monkey infested Buddhist temple, the two men grappling like Lawrentian blood brothers, and Stanwyk gaping hungrily on, absolutely thrilled.This central twist is part of the film's wider iconoclasm. Like more renowned peers (Minnelli, Sirk etc.), Dwan takes reactionary material and dismantles it. Firstly, the film offers an odd mish-mash of genres. The film is supposedly set in Burma and its environs, but this is an Orient in the tradition of Powell and Pressburger, the hero of whose 'Black Narcissus' stars here (Farrer). Whereas 'Narcissus' was a work of complete, defiant artifice, 'Escape' offers a disturbing clash between real location footage and cramped studio sets, often within the one scene which, especially in action sequences, has a jarring, alienating effect. The most notable example occurs early on, when Ryan and Stanwyk hunt a marauding tiger - the effect takes us out of the 'realistic' adventure and alerts us to a more symbolic plane. Although the film is set in the east, the three genres it evokes originate much further away. Even though the film is an action adventure - and a very exciting one, full of chases, gun-fights and dangerous animals - it is also a melodrama, about a lonely woman stranded in the middle of nowhere, powerful but so starved of 'companionship' she'll attach herself to the first man who comes along. Some of the lighting effects and careful compositions recall the contemporary melodramas of Sirk. The film also belongs to the jungle sub-genre, full of thick forests and animals being cute. Most important, however, the film is a transposed Western, with Ryan as the outlaw hiding out in Stanwyk's ranch, and Farrer the sherriff sent to being him back. Except, like Ray's 'Johnny Guitar', the colour, the mise-en-scene, the extravagant sexual rituals tend to undermine macho Western self-importance; a female 'Eastern' reflecting back the male Western.As the scene I mentioned earlier suggests - the brawl in the temple - the idea of play figures throughout, with narrative action turned into ritual or theatre, with extras, ceremonial gestures, and, most importantly, an audience. The most alarming of these is Ryan's torture, but throughout there is an emphasis on people watching, usually obscurely, through gaps and grills, or being framed in proscenium arches within the narrative frame. Another motif alerting us to mistrust appearances is the mirror- so often a symbol of metamorphosis or revelation; actual mirrors co-exist with mirroring scenes, for example the symmetrical skulking of Stanwyk and the tiger watched by Ryan (doubly mirrored and reversed in the temple scene)