Figures in a Landscape is a 1970 British film directed by Joseph Losey and written by star Robert Shaw, based on the 1968 novel of the same name by Barry England.

They sneak through, and get into a house, where the only inhabitant is a lonely widow sitting in a chair next to the bed of her presumably deceased husband.

They come up with a plan for Ansell to distract the helicopter while MacConnachie shoots its gas tank in order to destroy it.

At the time of filming, Robert Shaw was a quite well known star, whereas Malcolm McDowell was still relatively unknown as it was made in the period after If.... but before A Clockwork Orange.

The helicopter featured, an Aérospatiale Alouette II, XZ-2B2, based at Armilla, Granada, was flown by Gilbert Chomat.

[5] The New York Times critic Vincent Canby confers more accolades on Losey’s “magnificently photogenic, unidentified landscape” than on its allegorical elements- evidenced by his effort to “upgrade a genre movie by giving it an intellect.” Indeed, in this “stunningly realized adventure”, where the protagonists appear as metaphoric “Everyman” figures, the landscape itself provides as much drama as the interpersonal struggles of the two fugitives.

[8][9] Losey makes use of striking visual contrasts between long-shot and closeup; between movement and stasis; between long takes and Eisensteinian fragmentation.

The dissonant, sparingly used score by Richard Rodney Bennett further underlines the film’s fatalistic worldview.

Biographer Hirsch writes: [T]he image of the political world that appears in many of his films is evocatively symbolized in the hovering, omnipresent helicopter that relentlessly pursues and finally overtakes the escaped prisoners in Figures in the Landscape.