Review of Five Miles to Midnight

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 ****