Despite a sublime confidence in their craft and artistic skills, the British studios were nevertheless unbalanced by a shaky financial superstructure. Having lost £1,667,000 on production in 1946, J. Arthur Rank could hardly afford to have his distribution negotiations with the United States ruined the following year by the government's ad valorem duty on American films. A subsequent crash production programme to compensate for the shortage of American product came to grief after the spring of 1948, when the duty was removed and cinemas were swamped by the backlog. At the same time the government encouraged American companies to invest in filmmaking in Britain as a way of releasing their “blocked” earnings. The result was an American invasion of the British studios; and as government and studio decisions trickled down to the man on the studio floor, Alwyn found himself paid in Americansourced money and working with American directors.

Oddly, his first two commissions for American-financed productions preceded, by a nicety, the tax-settlement agreement. By the middle of January 1948 Alwyn was scoring for 20th Century–Fox British. The film was Escape (1948), directed by the visiting American Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Rex Harrison took on the role, which Gerald du Maurier had performed in the 1930 film version, of convict Matt Denant, who, unjustly convicted of murder, escapes into the fog of Dartmoor with police inspector Harris (William Hartnell) in close pursuit. It is yet another man-on-the-run narrative and must have reminded Alwyn of Odd Man Out, especially after Denant injures his arm in a plane crash and staggers between locations weak and in pain. Despite the temptation, the score only echoes for a few bars the rhythmic beat of Odd Man Out's concluding funeral march.

Those newspaper critics who were concerned that Hollywood screenwriter Philip Dunne did not stay faithful to Galsworthy's stage drama failed to recognise that Mankiewicz was instead expressing cinematic virtues. Turning to account the landscape, the bracken, bogs, rocks, and hills of the moors, Mankiewicz reinforced Denant's despair that his past actions have stripped him of the thing he values most, his freedom. It is this statement that Alwyn reinforces musically, and it is strongly conveyed in the opening.

Setting the mood as early as the censor card, an optimistic rising four-note motive on strings is all too quickly inverted into a fast descending pattern, creating an atmosphere of tension and desperation. As the screen preliminaries continue, the strings settle to a brief ostinato of the descending motive as brass in competition struggles to rise, only to be constantly pulled back, as it were, by the strings.