Anthony Perkins and Sophia Loren Paris 1962....insurance fraud thriller... sounds good? WRONG.Anthony Perkins was ruined by Psycho...after his success there he seems to be used for only one role:a weird creepy out of control character--certainly the case in this movie.The story is so unlikely and Perkins so unlikeable both factors make this movie a dud. What can I say it is poorly written not suspenseful. It has lots of very boring or irritating plot mechanisms and red herrings that fall flat. Mostly I think though that it is Perkin's chemistry that wrecks it.Sophia Loren 28 being chased by 55 year old male heroes somehow is just irritating too....I was so glad when Loren murdered Perkins. Both the hero and antihero are repulsive in this thing.God this thing was awful...DO NOT RECOMMEND--you will regret watching it.

The first thing that will strike viewers as strange is the title. Is "Five Miles To Midnight" a common expression? If so, I've never heard of it before. Anyway, placed next to the movie, it doesn't make that much sense, even though a character in the movie does say the title out loud at one point. If they had used the Charles Bronson title "10 To Midnight", it would have made a bit more sense.The second thing that will be strange to viewers is the pairing of Anthony Perkins and Sophia Loren. True, they were paired together as a romantic couple a few years earlier in "Desire Under The Elms", but reportedly that worked as well as it does here. How a beauty in the form of Loren could be attracted to the nervous, boyish Perkins is hard to swallow, to say the least.But even if the title was fixed AND they got two lead actors with better (and believable) chemistry together, I think the movie still wouldn't have worked. I could see this story being told as a short graphic story in the comic "Tales From The Crypt". I could see this story working as a half-hour episode (with commercials) of a show like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". Or even as a full hour. But this telling of the story lasts about 110 minutes. It's VERY slow-moving, full of padding like the stuff with the little nosy boy. Plus, the ending of the movie is very predictable - I guessed what would happen after reading the plot synopsis before actually starting the movie.Far from the worst movie I've seen, but still not worth seeing. Trust me, you've seen this story before one way or another.

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 ****

This is not a great film, but it's enough of a curious film to merit watching. The story deals with a wife who loathes her husband (Anthony Perkins) and thinks him dead. If it is true she is well rid of him. It is not true, and he forces her to go through a life insurance swindle (for a big paying policy on his life). In the course of the movie she meets an insurance investigator (Gig Young) who she would really feel good with. But she has to keep up the lie that Perkins is dead, and Young grows more suspicion. And the pressure of the lie, and meeting Perkins demands, and facing Young's questions is building up more and more on Loren. The conclusion (which I will not reveal) was a surprise for Loren fans, and remains the only time she ever did this in a movie - she goes mad.