The Runaway Bus (also known as Scream in the Night) is a 1954 British comedy film produced, written and directed by Val Guest.

It stars Frankie Howerd, Margaret Rutherford and Petula Clark and an ensemble cast of character actors in a story about a bus caught in fog while a gang of crooks tries to carry off a heist.

[2] The film was shot at Southall Studios in London with sets designed by the art director Wilfred Arnold.

Harassed airline employees find emergency relief coach 13 and reserve driver Percy Lamb to transport her.

Unbeknownst to most of them, robbers have stolen £200,000 worth of gold bullion from the airport bonded store and hidden the proceeds in the boot of the coach.

Under questioning by Inspector Henley, one breaks down and admits the gold was stowed on the coach and that the mysterious and notorious "Banker" is the mastermind.

Percy saves the day: he had removed the rotor arm from the engine beforehand, and knocks the pistol out of Miss Beeston's hand with a stone.

The huge success of Norman Wisdom in Trouble in Store led to British film companies signing up other comics from TV, radio and variety.

[6] Howerd's biographer said that The Runaway Bus "was a kind of a cross between a cut-price version of The Cat and the Canary and a very half-hearted reworking of The Ghost Train" which Guest had helped adapt for Arthur Askey.

In September 1953 the New York Times announced that the film would be called Scream in the Night and star Howerd and Belinda Lee, who the paper said had never acted before and was the seventy-seventh girl who auditioned.

He is unable to bring to the cinema those qualities which have made him so successful on the radio and in the music hall, and relies on mannerisms and grimaces which, though often quite funny, are not sufficient to sustain a film.