Nine Miles to Noon

Dolores Sutton has just remarried, but he son, Peter Lazer takes a dislike to his stepfather, Renato Baldini. He's a construction man with a good business, but between the boy's attitude and Miss Sutton's lack of effort to make the new family dynamic work, Baldini begins to lose patience. Lazer wants his father, who he thinks is dead.... until Morgan Sterne shows up claiming to have known the dead man. It's sort of a lie. He is Mis Sutton's first husband, and he wants Baldini dead, so he can take his wife and his child and enjoy the money. But he manipulates the boy into making the murder attempt.

The movie wears its subtext out in the open so that it lacks any subtlety, but it's interesting to watch the dynamics of the struggle play out against the backdrop of Athens, handsomely shot from Piraeus to the Parthenon to a new, huge development going up. Writer-director Herbert Leder gets a better movie than he perhaps deserves, thanks to the cast and scenery.

Carol Reed could have made something of this, but Herbert Leder is no Carol Reed. There is nothing wrong about the story, but a thriller including children like this without any psychology becomes very thin. The best actor is Renato Baldini, and he makes almost every scene in which he acts interesting. Dolores Sutton as the mother is the only good person of any psychological insight, she knows her former husband, can read him and sees through his wicked intentions, while the main asset of the film is the great sequences around the monuments of Athens, when they are all chasing each other, one to carry through a murder, another to stop that at any cost, two fathers vying for fatherhood, and policemen all over the place without knowing what they are chasing or for what, while at least they know they have to rescue lives. As a Greek thriller drama about a child it is fairly realistic, while the child should not talk to strangers.