Customer Reviews

Five Miles to Midnight [VHS]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

this was my mother's favorite movie. we would watch it sometimes back to back, it seemed like five hours.

Don't you love Anthony Perkins? He's at his very best in FIVE MILES TO MIDNIGHT, a suspense thriller from the last days of JFK's administration. He's teamed with his perdurable co-star Sophia Loren, the tasty Italian import whom Tony first met as they played country bumpkins in a ludicrous adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS. Here Sophia is playing a European woman, which is all to the good, who somehow gets entangled with a mixed up American vet, sort of like Howard Hughes, played by Tony Perkins. What Sophia Loren doesn't realize is that her husband is crazy, abusive and violent!

Another 25 years later they re-did this movie with Julia Roberts playing the abused wife who fakes her own death to escape from a savage hubby. Here PERKINS fakes his own death to avoid financial ruin and also, it seems, to be in a better position to drive Sophia Loren insane! Poor Lisa, who happens to have two high placed pals, Jean Pierre Aumont and Gig Young, seasoned reporters, from whom she must conceal her tale of woe, a tale so bizarre nobody would believe it! Her cover story isn't very coherent, and no one can figure out why the plane crash that killed Robert might not have been kosher. Some lovely European vistas are glimpsed out the windows of the hotels and restaurants in the movie. You can make out Rousseau's grave in one such cutaway. When Sophia Loren starts falling for Gig Young, while trying to preserve the secret that her husband is still alive, it's another twist of the knife for all concerned!

Nowadays the theme of the battered wife is a cliche, but back then it was scandalous, simply scandalous. People theorized that Sophia Loren's own marriage wasn't too far removed from the union of Bob and Lisa, and other fans resented the way director Anatole Litwak seems to have directed Tony Perkins to act exactly like Norman Bates, except even more evil. It's a school of hard knocks for all of them, and only Gig Young seems 100 per cent innocent. I kept asking myself, if I were forced to make a choice between Tony Perkins and Gig Young, what would I do? It was this salubrious dilemma that kept me up five miles to midnight.

EXCELLENT! EXCELLENT! EXCELLETN! EXCELLENT!
I wish it could have been on a DVD & not a VHS-TAPE!)
But! It is still....
EXCELLENT!

Let the viewer beware - don't start this film if you haven't the time to finish it! I watched only one or two minutes of it on TCM (cable network) and was hooked, even though I'm no fan of Sophia Loren. The young Anthony Perkins was a typical American jerk trying to live off others, a type found in Europe often enough, and his resemblance to the young Bush Sr. was disconcerting. That he loved to drink, talk his head off, fool others, lie, and be violent to get his way - all part of his great personality in this film!

Sophia Loren plays the sucker wife, in gratitude to this leech from Wisconsin, for "rescuing" her from the hellhole of Naples and moving her to Paris. She is supposedly gorgeous, with men oggling her, and it's not to her hubby's liking. She is employed as a fashion assistant to the wealthy women coming to an upscale design house. Her demeanor is dure, no happy camper, a woman accepting these terms for survival.

When her husband "Bob" cooks up a scheme to collect life insurance by claiming to have been killed in the airplane accident which only threw him a distance, he then squeezes her to start processing the documents to get the $120,000, or 60 Million French Francs. That would be about six houses in San Francisco at that time in 1963, to give you some idea, so the equivalent now would be about $3,500,000. And this amount she collects in cash (minus 3-4% fee..golly), puts in her purse, and starts driving around in Paris with it, a tied-up bundle.

Every few minutes this film twists and turns, with sharp camera work on the streets of Paris, at the Metro entrances, in the cafes, in the restaurants, with the men milling about smoking, drinking and leering, with the schoolchildren snaking together, with the traffic circulating around the roundabouts, and the inside scenes of the narrow staircases of middle-class apartments, with their slanted rooftops for added thrills.

I think the scenes with the boy, an American neighbor with an absent mother and "very busy" father, who becomes interested in the husband, are the best. He's a smart-aleck boy of about ten, who's been spying on the man who never leaves his apartment - obviously, Anthony Perkins is supposed to be dead, so he's out of sight all day.

The acting is perfect, with police inspectors, waiters and fellow Americans in Paris, with black and white sharpness.

Above all, the SUSPENSE!!! You can never guess what will happen next! Every chance encounter can become a prison sentence for either husband or wife, as they enter into major fraud, becoming more and more paranoid over phone calls, doorbells ringing, letters arriving, etc. Will they be caught? Will he do something nasty to someone, including really bad violence against his wife?

I leave it to you to see the ending, which didn't surprise me totally, but kept me glued to the set even when I needed the bathroom badly!

If you need distraction, this is it.

Plus, it's Paris, 1963. Have a look: almost 50 years ago.

Sophia seemed a little weak in her performance until the very end when she really shined. Perkins was on key. This was a much better film than BLUES IN THE NIGHT also directed by Anatole Litvak. Reminded me a lot of Hitchcock`s style.