Escape Me Never (Warner Bros., filmed 1945, released 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (June 9) Turner Classic Movies was doing a salute to director Peter Godfrey, who inexplicably got a number of high-prestige assignments at Warner Bros. in the mid-1940’s, including films with “A”-list talents like Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, and Errol Flynn. The film my husband Charles and I watched together was Escape Me Never, a remake of a 1935 film from Britain starring Elisabeth Bergner and one which Charles and I had seen many years ago in the first flush of our relationship. We’d seen it on a VHS tape of a previous TCM showing hosted by their founding on-air personality, the late Robert Osborne, who’d told a fascinating story. It seems that Escape Me Never was released while its star, Errol Flynn, was shooting a big-budget swashbuckler called The Adventures of Don Juan for director Vincent Sherman. Until Escape Me Never was released, Flynn had been behaving himself on the Don Juan set, but when the film came out and critics savaged Flynn’s acting, he was so traumatized he went off the deep end and started turning up either late or not at all. I remember being amazed by that story if only because, of all the four principals in Escape Me Never, Flynn turned in by far the best performance of the lot! I’ve mentioned several times that Flynn, like such other pretty-boy types of his generation (Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor – and, decades later, Tom Selleck), actually grew as an actor once he started losing his looks and realized he could no longer coast on them. Escape Me Never was based on a novel by British author Margaret Kennedy as part of a cycle of stories about the Dubrok family, a group of musicians who’ve maintained their talents through several generations. Another story in the Dubrok cycle that Warner Bros. had just filmed in 1943, The Constant Nymph, starring Joan Fontaine and Charles Boyer (Fontaine said in her autobiography that Boyer was by far the best co-star she ever had in terms of being willing to work with her and not hog the spotlight; not surprisingly, she said the worst actor she’d ever played with was Orson Welles), had been a major hit, so Jack Warner and his second-in-command, Henry Blanke, green-lighted this one.

The story takes place in 1900 and opens in Venice. When the new year starts, mediocre composer Caryl Dubrok (Gig Young) is engaged to marry heiress Fenella MacLean (Eleanor Parker). Only as Caryl is packing up to leave an outdoor nightclub gig, Fenella’s parents (Reginald Denny and Isobel Elsom) are accosted by a young woman named Gemma Smith (Ida Lupino) who’s part of a school tour group visiting the old castle where the MacLeans are staying. They catch Gemma in their daughter’s bedroom stealing a pair of gloves, and she explains that she’s not really a student, but she poses as one because by joining their tour groups she can cadge free lunches for herself and her infant son Piccolo. Gemma tells us that just about every emotionally significant person in her life has died: first her mother, then her father, then the husband who was Piccolo’s father. (Charles read that last twist as the usual Production Code-mandated B.S., a cover story to hide Piccolo’s illegitimate origins.) She’s living with Caryl’s far more talented brother, Sebastian Dubrok (Errol Flynn, oddly clean-shaven in this movie even though Warners’ make-up man Perc Westmore did up Gig Young with a moustache of his own and a lot of black goop in his hair to make him at least look like Errol Flynn’s brother), though at least at first there’s no sexual or romantic relationship between them. Sebastian had just taken pity on her and offered her a place to stay, but when Gemma shows up and asks the whereabouts of a musician named Dubrok, son of a famous father, the MacLeans assume she means Caryl and he’s a no-good bastard who’s two-timing their daughter. The MacLeans take Fenella and head for the Dolomite Mountains, a sub-range of the Alps on the Italian-Swiss border, and Sebastian and Caryl decide to hike there to follow them and explain the mixup. At first they plan to leave Gemma behind, but she insists on coming along and bringing Piccolo with them. Once they arrive Sebastian and Gemma work out a musical act to make them some money by playing in outdoor cafés, and the big song they perform is called “Love to Love,” actually written by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (who scored the entire film, including the big ballet sequence towards the end) with lyrics by Aldo Franchetti and Harold Arlen’s old collaborator, Ted Koehler. (According to imdb.com, Ida Lupino had a voice double: Peg LaCentra, Artie Shaw’s female band singer in the mid-1930’s.)

Unfortunately, having no idea who she is, Sebastian makes a moonlight pass at Fenella and he’s so stricken by her he’s inspired to compose a new ballet, “Primavera,” which Fenella offers to help him get produced in London when they all return there. Fenella’s connections also help get the great conductor Heinrich (Albert Bassermann, who performed so memorably in the films Foreign Correspondent and A Woman’s Face even though he knew no English and had to have people interpret for him; Foreign Correspondent’s director, Alfred Hitchcock, had got his start in Germany and had learned German to communicate with his crews, while on A Woman’s Face his interpreter was co-star Conrad Veidt, who had fled the Nazis in 1933 and made films first in Britain and then the U.S.) and the music publisher Steinach (Ludwig Stössel) to help. Steinach also gives Caryl a job, presumably as a music editor or copyist, so he and Fenella will be able to marry at last – only Fenella isn’t sure she still wants to marry Caryl now that she’s got the hots for Sebastian. Things come to a head in London, where Sebastian agrees to marry Gemma even though he’s also carrying on an affair (as torrid a one as the Production Code would allow) with Fenella. At the dress rehearsal for his ballet Sebastian has an argument with the prima donna ballerina Natrova (Milada Mladova) and the ballet appears to be off, but he relents and changes the title from “Primavera” to “Gemma – Escape Me Never.” He also redoubles his commitment to Gemma after her baby son Piccolo dies, and sends Fenella off to marry Caryl. Escape Me Never is a problematic film in a lot of ways, and it was such a major flop it didn’t even make back its negative cost, much less draw enough to cover whatever Warner Bros. spent on advertising and promotion, but as I said about it the last time I saw it, it’s an excellent showcase for Errol Flynn. Sebastian works as a character because in a lot of ways he is Errol Flynn, torn between a devil-may-care attitude about life and especially about romantic commitments and a fierce pride in his work. Sebastian feels about composing the way Flynn felt about acting: on one level he pretends not to care about it while he gets fiercely proud of his skills and reacts quite strongly whenever anyone questions his talents.

And this time around I liked Ida Lupino’s performance a lot better than I had the last time I saw it; she plays Gemma as a tough, no-nonsense broad, unsentimental and scarred throughout her life by the deaths of just about everyone near and dear to her: first her mother, then her father, then her husband (assuming there was one), and finally her son. She also has a light but thoroughly believable Cockney accent, making it even more ironic that just a few years after making this film, she was turned down for a role as a British woman because the director said that, even though she was British originally, she’d lived in America so long she’d lost the accent. What’s hard to take about Escape Me Never is the sheer weight of Margaret Kennedy’s plot melodramatics (she not only wrote the original novel, she did her own adaptation as a play and she co-wrote the script for the film with Thames Williamson and an uncredited Lenore Coffee) – the moment we see that child in reel one we know he’s going to come to a bad end somewhere along the line. We do get the impression that the London fog and the straitened circumstances in which Gemma and Sebastian lived (he constantly has to borrow money from Caryl to keep the lights and heat on) did Piccolo in, and frankly she’d have been much better off staying in Venice and and marrying the baker who was genuinely in love with her even though he was a widower twice her age and with five kids of his own. Escape Me Never was the last film score Erich Wolfgang Korngold composed under his 12-year contract with Warner Bros.; when he took the assignment it was with the understanding that as soon as his contract ended he would leave the studio and return to his first love, classical music. Korngold had been a child prodigy in Vienna – he composed a ballet at 11 and a piano sonata at 13 – and went on to a major adult career writing operas like Violanta and Die Tote Stadt (“City of the Dead”), a macabre tale about a young man whose girlfriend dies and then he meets a woman who is either her ghost or someone who looks almost exactly like her.

In 1934 Korngold was lured to Hollywood by stage director Max Reinhardt, who had done a famous production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – first in August Schlegel’s German translation and then on Broadway in Shakespeare’s original English. He had hired Korngold to adapt and rework Mendelssohn’s incidental music for the play (“incidental music” is just like film music except it accompanies a live play instead of a film), and when Reinhardt got an offer from Warner Bros. to do a film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he brought Korngold along and put him in charge of the music. Over the next 12 years Korngold worked at Warners and composed some of the greatest film music of all time, notably for the blockbuster hit Anthony Adverse (for which he won his first Academy Award) and Errol Flynn’s swashbucklers (Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood – for which he won his second Oscar – and The Sea Hawk). But after Escape Me Never he decided he was through with Hollywood because, while the studio had given him a comfortable living, it had also cost him his reputation with the classical-music audience and he was determined to win it back. Between his departure from Warners in 1947 and his death 10 years later, Korngold would work on only one more film: adapting the music of Wagner for William Dieterle’s biopic Magic Fire (Republic, 1956). One of the great frustrations of Escape Me Never is we never get to see the whole ballet – just a contentious rehearsal sequence in which Sebastian and Natrova have their big blow-up – and I think Warners missed a big opportunity not only to show the full ballet but to shoot it in color. Still, Escape Me Never is a much better movie than its reputation, and if this was to be Korngold’s exit from film music, he went out with the proverbial bang. Errol Flynn and Ida Lupino turn in excellent performances – as I noted above, in his surface affectation of a devil-may-care attitude towards life while he really cares deeply about his reputation as an artist, Sebastian Dubrok basically is Errol Flynn – and his and Lupino’s sincerity (and Sol Polito’s dark, almost noir cinematography) overcome the weaknesses of the supporting cast, Kennedy’s story, and Peter Godfrey’s professionally acceptable but not great direction.