Situation Hopeless... But Not Serious is a 1965 oddball comedy film shot in black and white directed by Gottfried Reinhardt and starring Alec Guinness, Mike Connors and Robert Redford. It is based on the 1960 novel The Hiding Place by Robert Shaw.

Robert Archibald Shaw was an English actor, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. Beginning his career in theatre, Shaw joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre after the Second World War and appeared in productions of Macbeth, Henry VIII, Cymbeline, and other Shakespeare plays. With the Old Vic company (1951–52), he continued primarily in Shakespearean roles. In 1959 he starred in a West End production of The Long and the Short and the Tall.