A Smile Goes a Long Way

Five Miles to Midnight. In the screaming jangle of a Paris nightclub. Lisa (Sophia Loren) is dancing le twist with head-back abandon. Enter Robert, the husband, whose winsome, small-boy smile reveals instantly that he is Tony Perkins. Moments later. Robert has bared his vicious little ego and in a fit of petulance is smacking the daylights out of Wife Lisa to launch this chilling story of mismatched mates. When Lisa gets the news that Robert's airliner, bound for Casablanca, has crashed near Bordeaux killing all on board, her grief is tempered with relief. Two nights later, she is awakened by a rapping at the door. It is Robert, bleeding and disheveled, but still smiling his winsome smile, and still alive. "Airplanes." he explains, "do funny things before they crash." So do plot lines. It seems that the emergency exit blew out and he dropped on a hilltop a mile from the wreck.

Why not collect the $120,000 in insurance Robert took out at the airport? They do. and the camera follows them on a midnight ride to the border, right up to the moment when Lisa realizes that the man who is dead in the insurance books is going to have to be dead in fact. The scene that follows is calculated to turn audiences' arteries into blutwurst.

Director Anatole Litvak tangles the skein of fate with finesse; from Sophia he has coaxed some fine flashes of doe-eyed terror, and he has allowed Tony to prove what a convincing actor he can be when he is not embroiled with Kafka or Racine.

Five Miles to Midnight is a scary if implausible thriller. And it is filmed in good old black and white.

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