Il coltello nella piaga

Certainly Anatole Litvak was no slouch as a director, but he missed the mark here in "Five Miles to Midnight," a 1962 film starring Sophia Loren, Tony Perkins and Gig Young.

Lisa Macklin (Sophia Loren) married to an American, believes that her husband (Tony Perkins) has been killed in an airplane crash. Actually, he was a survivor and wants to collect $120,000 in insurance he took out before the flight by pretending to be dead. Of course, his wife has to collect it.

The two don't exactly get along, and the only way to be rid of him is for Lisa to collect the money for him. She is falling for a newspaperman (Young), who is suspicious as to what is going on. Her husband promises he will let her go once he has the money.

This is a very unsatisfactory film, in part because of the miscasting of Tony Perkins as Loren's husband. Not only that, but the acting just isn't very good even from pros like Loren, Perkins and Young.

Litvak only made two more films after this - it appears he lost his touch after making some marvelous films: This Above All, All This and Heaven Too, Tovarich, City for Conquest. Either that or he had to make too many concessions.

At any rate, he didn't pay too much attention to what the actors were doing. The story just meanders along. Not very good.

Anthony Perkins is not exactly the abusive husband type (especially to an ever-beautiful Sophia Loren). Add to it the plot elements of master-minding an insurance fraud, and the odds of good-natured Perkins pulling it off become immeasurable.

The sole survivor of a plane crash, Perkins was fortunate to have taken out a special insurance policy (even if the odds of dying in a crash were 1 in 1,000,000). Good wife Loren, already prepared for widowhood by the "news", gets a good shock when Perkins shows up, pressuring Loren to play along with the hoax to collect the insurance money.

Although the ending is somewhat of a surprise, the time spent getting there seems like an endless and tiresome walk through the woods, only to arrive at a run down greasy spoon as a reward. Without any frills or glamour, even shot in b&w, this is a less than average vehicle for either of the stars. Look for a young Tommy Norden (of TV's "Flipper" Fame) in a minor role. Otherwise, skip it altogether!**

FIVE MILES TO MIDNIGHT seems to leave other reviewers on here bored and cold. Maybe my positive reaction is due to my expectations being next to dinosaur bones, but I enjoyed myself a lot. Loren and Perkins are playing a mismatched married couple, so the lack of romantic spark between them WORKS. The two are each manipulative in their own way-- Perkins narcissistic and immature, Loren vulnerable and looking for a safety net-- so I enjoyed watching the cat and mouse games between them.

If the film has any flaws, it's a lack of punch in the suspense scenes. I feel like the director never milked these moments enough, certainly not the way a master like Hitchcock would have. Still, the characters are great and I liked the fatalistic noir vibe of the whole story.

You would think that any thriller beginning with Sophia Loren doing the Twist in a Paris nightclub couldn't be all bad! Unfortunately, the plot mechanisms (and red herrings) of "Five Miles to Midnight" nearly defeat Loren, very good as the put-upon wife of a neurotic who has sneakily walked away from a plane crash, hoping to collect on his flight insurance worth $120,000. Anthony Perkins, more nervous and fey than ever, continually bites his fingernail, his face twitching in possessive jealousy, while we in the audience wait in agony for Loren to come to her senses and put him out of his misery. It's hard to determine which element of the picture is more inappropriate: Perkins' icky Norman Bates-isms, Gig Young's leering, Cheshire Cat-like performance as an ex-detective-turned-newspaper man, or Mikis Theodorakis' insanely 'Parisienne' background music. ** from ****

I hadn't bothered watching this before because of the negative reviews it always seems to get, but I love Sophia and she made so few decent movies in the genre's I like to watch, that I finally gave it a go, and I was pleasantly surprised I found this to be a very enjoyable sub Hitchcock vehicle Anthony Perkins is very effective as the wheedling, manipulative man child that is his trademark and Gig Young is effectively ambiguous as the smarmy, stranger, who may turn out be an ally or an enemy The movie teases you with possibilities for violence or revelation that come to nothing, so that when something does happen it is all the more of a surprise (Which is considered slow and old fashioned these days, but was par for the course back then) Black and white suits the ambiance that they producers are aiming for, the veneer of French avant guard for a film that aspires to be more than it is, however what it is, is still fine by me PS; - Those who strangely expected Sophia to take her clothes off at some point obviously don't know her very well, as apart from, and perhaps because of, her experiences in her very early days in the movie business, she never does more than undo a couple of top buttons, as she does here