After having a fight with her husband, Robert (Anthony Perkins), that turns physical, Lisa Macklin (Sophia Loren) decides she's had enough and tells him that she wants a divorce. He fights it at first, but finally agrees, telling her they'll figure it all out once he returns to Paris after a quick business trip. Lisa is stunned the next day when the newspaper says that Robert's plane crashed somewhere in France with no survivors. She's even more surprised then when he turns up on her doorstep, claiming he survived when he was thrown from the wreckage in the crash. Lisa wants nothing to do with him, but he makes a deal with her. He took out an insurance policy before takeoff, and he'll leave her behind for good if she receives the $120,000 claim and gives it to him. Can she go through with it though just to rid herself of him?
Two days after watching this movie, I'm not really sure what to write about. Like any movie, there's positives and negatives to take away, but what were they? It's that rare movie I can't come up with something to write about. So here goes, probably a review that rambles more than it should. 'Five Miles' has some odd casting choices and not necessarily for the better, knows where it wants to get but not how to get there, has some excellent on-location work in Paris (hard to mess that up), and has an ending that while not particularly surprising still provides a bit of a shock factor. Okay, that's a good start I guess.
Four years earlier in Desire Under the Elms, Loren and Perkins worked together so while I haven't seen that movie, I feel safe saying they must have had better chemistry than they did here. Sophia Loren is maybe the most beautiful actress to ever grace the screen, and while I don't intend this as a dig against Perkins, they just don't look good together. Is it fair to judge a movie on whether its cast members look good together? For me, I needed some reason to believe that at some point Loren's Lisa met Perkins' Robert and fell for him. Instead, we get nothing. It also seems a stretch that Loren would be scared of a skinny guy like Anthony Perkins. A great comment at the IMDB said that one punch/slap from the Italian actress, and he'd be down for the duration.
If it makes sense, the two actors don't have a great chemistry together, but their performances on their own are interesting. Two years removed from the success of Psycho, it's easy to see Perkins already being typecast in Norman Bates-mode. He makes Robert this neurotic ball of energy, at one second charming and personable while the next second he's overbearing, jealous and abusive. As is the case with Lisa, his smile has a disarming effect on people, able to diffuse the situations he so often gets himself into. Loren too delivers a solid performance as a young wife simply pushed too far past her limits. She's had enough with her husband but has no way to get out of the situation any quicker than it's going. Her descent into some sort of madness is creepy to watch, making the ending that much better.
The problem with that ending is that director Anatole Litvak takes his sweet time getting there. After the plane crash, Robert does his best Lazarus impression and is back in the story by about the 20-minute mark. Then, as Lisa goes through the process of getting the insurance check, we get another 90 minutes building to the ending, and it is slow going. Not much happens in between, and that's where the movie struggles. Perkins interacts with a boy (Tommy Norden) curious why he never leaves the apartment. Lisa moves on, starting to see newspaper writer Gig Young who's naturally curious about what's going on. Building tension is one thing, but it's clear Lisa is nearing her limit, and the story just keeps piling on and on.
What saves 'Five Miles' from being a really bad, pointless even boring movie is the last 20 minutes. You see the twist coming two-fold if you're paying attention at all, but that doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable to watch it unfold. Better than the twist is the finale then, the final nails in the coffin for one character. I was definitely surprised with that aspect of the story, especially the movie ending on such a sour note. The other positive is the look of the movie whether it be the vast Macklin apartment that still manages to be claustrophobic or the Parisian locations. It's got to be impossible to make that city look bad, and 'Five Miles' doesn't go for lots of known locations either. Still, the movie is a mixed bag, and one I struggled to get through.
Five Miles to Midnight <---trailer (1962): **/****
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