Announcement
Collapse
No announcement yet.
Five Miles To Midnight
Collapse
X
Collapse
-
Five Miles To Midnight
Released by: Kino Studio Classics
Released on: July 26th, 2016.
Director: Anatole Litvak
Cast: Sophia Loren, Anthony Perkins, Gig Young, Jean-Pierre Aumont
Year: 1962
Purchase From Amazon
The Movie:
Directed by Anatole Litvak in 1962, Five Miles To Midnight was one of the seemingly countless suspense thrillers that were being cranked out in the early sixties. It's a better than average film made more interesting than it should be thanks to the pairing of Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins.
Loren plays Lisa Macklin, an Italian woman married to an American man named Robert (Perkins). They get into a fight in a night club in Paris one night, and then next morning he leaves her to go off on a business trip. She tells him it's done, she doesn't want anything to do with him anymore, but shortly after that, while out with a newspaper reporter friend named Alan Stewart (Jean-Pierre Aumont), she learns that the plane he was travelling on has crashed.
After Robert's funeral, Lisa wakes up to see her husband, presumed dead, alive and well in their apartment. He got lucky, when the plane crashed, he was thrown from the wreckage and survived. He now plans to make a grab for a hefty insurance claim that he conveniently managed to take out on himself, just before his flight. The plan is that she'll collect it as the grieving widow and hand it over to him. She's okay with this, as she figures once he has the money he'll leave her for good. Meanwhile, she falls for a man named David Barnes (Gig Young), who knows more than he lets on to.
Five Miles To Midnight looks great, shot in high contrast black and white. It's a slick looking picture with some excellent location photography, plenty of shadowy interiors and a really nice look to it. It's also fairly predictable, though still fairly entertaining thanks to the casting. Sophia Loren is absolutely gorgeous here, she's got plenty of screen presence and style to spare. If the movie were nothing more than watching her strut about various interesting locations, it would still be worth watching as she really is stunning. The rest of the cast are interesting too, however. Gig Young is quite good as the new man in her life. He catches on that something is up faster than she expects, but it makes sense given that he's clearly paying attention to things. Jean-Pierre Aumont as the newspaper reporter is also fine. As to Perkins? Even only a few short years after Psycho was made he was already getting typecast as the 'weird guy' in various movies, this being one of them. A lot of the quirks that made Norman Bates as interesting to watch as he was in Hitchcock's classic are recycled here, the nervousness and eccentric mannerisms and the like. That said, he's good in the part and a lot of fun to watch.
Ultimately this is a decent watch, if not a lost classic. It's well made, reasonably suspenseful and features a good case - but most viewers won't have too much trouble figuring out where it's all headed, or even how it's going to get there.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Five Miles To Midnight arrives on a 25GB Blu-ray disc in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition picture framed at 1.66.1 and it looks good (“newly remastered in HD!â€), with proper framing. There's a bit of minor print damage here and there but it's mostly relegated to small white specks, for the most part the image is quite clean. Compression artifacts are never a problem though and shadow detail is quite good. The image appears to be free of any heavy noise reduction or edge enhancement but there are moments where contrast blooms just a tiny bit. The good most certainly outweighs the bad, however, and this is, overall, a very nice transfer.
The only audio option on the disc is an English language DTS-HD Mono track, there are no alternate language tracks or subtitles provided. The clarity is generally fine, though there are bits that sound a little flat, which likely stems back to the source. There are no issues with any hiss or distortion and while this track won't set the world on fire, it sounds just fine.
Extras are slim but there is an alternate scene taken from the French cut of the film, a trailer for the feature, trailers for a few other related titles, static menus and chapter selection.
The Final Word:
Kino's Blu-ray release of Five Miles To Midnight looks and sounds very nice, even if it is a bit lit on extras. The movie itself is worth seeing for Loren alone, although the rest of the cast are quite good too. It's a slick, if fairly predictable, thriller that is a bit light on substance, even if it is loaded with style.
Posting comments is disabled.
Categories
Collapse
article_tags
Collapse
- album review (218)
- album reviews (274)
- arrow video (272)
- blu-ray (3225)
- blu-ray review (4162)
- comic books (1392)
- comic reviews (872)
- comics (988)
- dark horse comics (484)
- dvd and blu-ray reviews a-f (1969)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews G-M (1711)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews N-S (1757)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews T-Z (878)
- dvd review (2513)
- idw publishing (216)
- image comics (207)
- kino lorber (391)
- movie news (260)
- review (318)
- scream factory (279)
- severin films (300)
- shout! factory (537)
- twilight time (269)
- twilight time releasing (231)
- vinegar syndrome (497)
Latest Articles
Collapse
-
Released by: Kino Lorber
Released on: February 22nd, 2022.
Director: Gianfranco Parolini
Cast: Lee Van Cleef, Jack Palance
Year: 1976
Purchase From Amazon
God’s Gun – Movie Review:
Directed by Gianfranco Parolini in 1976, quite late in the spaghetti western boom years, God's Gun (Diamante Lobo in Italy) introduces us to a bad, bad man named Sam Clayton (Jack Palance) who, along with his gang of equally bad, bad men, start wreaking...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 12:10 PM -
-
Released by: Kino Lorber
Released on: October 8th, 2019.
Director: Mario Bava
Cast: Christopher Lee, Reg Park, Leonora Ruffo, Gaia Germani
Year: 1968
Purchase From Amazon
Hercules In The Haunted World – Movie Review:
Directed by Mario Bava in 1961 and featuring a screenplay by Bava (and Sandro Continenza, Francesco Prosperi and Duccio Tessari), Hercules In The Haunted World (also known as Hercules At The Center Of The Earth and...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 12:08 PM -
-
Released by: Cinématographe
Released on: March 26th, 2024.
Director: Jack Nicholson
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Mary Steenburgen, Christopher Lloyd, John Belushi
Year: 1978
Purchase From Amazon
Goin’ South – Movie Review:
Made at the height of his career as an actor, 1978’s ‘Goin’ South’ sees Jack Nicholson once again in the director’s chair, seven years after his directorial debut, ‘Drive, He Said,’ failed to set the...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 10:29 AM -
-
Released by: Radiance Films
Released on: April 20th, 2024.
Director: Noburo Nakamura
Cast: Miyuki Kuwano, Mikijiro Hira
Year: 1964
Purchase From Amazon
The Shape Of Night – Movie Review:
Directed by Noburo Nakamura for Shochiko in 1964, ‘The Shape Of Night’ follows a young woman named Yoshie Nomoto (Miyuki Kuwano). In the opening scene, she’s working as a streetwalker on the outskirts of town and soon enough, she’s picked...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 10:26 AM -
-
Released by: Film Masters
Released on: April 23rd, 2024.
Director: Bert I. Gordon
Cast: Richard Carlson, Juli Reding, Lugene Sanders, Susan Gordon
Year: 1963
Purchase From Amazon
Tormented – Movie Review:
The late Bert I. Gordon’s 1963 horror film, ‘Tormented,’ is an effectively spooky ghost story made with an obviously low budget but no less effective for it.
The story revolves around a professional piano player...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 10:19 AM -
-
Released by: Grindhouse Releasing
Released on: March 12th, 2024.
Director: William Grefé
Cast: William Shatner, Jennifer Bishop, Ruth Roman, Harold Sakata
Year: 1974
Purchase From Amazon
Impulse – Movie Review:
Directed by the one and only William Grefé, 1974’s Impulse is one of those rare films that allows you to witness what it would be like if a really sweaty William Shatner got mad at a lady carrying balloons. Before that...-
Channel: Movies
04-15-2024, 01:20 PM -