SYNOPSICS
Le couteau dans la plaie (1962) is a English movie. Anatole Litvak has directed this movie. Sophia Loren,Anthony Perkins,Gig Young,Jean-Pierre Aumont are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1962. Le couteau dans la plaie (1962) is considered one of the best Crime,Drama movie in India and around the world.
Lisa Macklin, an Italian woman, has a fight with her American husband Robert in a Paris night club. He leaves the next day for a business trip and Lisa says she does not want to see him again. She is with newspaperman Alan Stewart that evening when she learns Robert's plane has crashed with no survivors. Waking from sedation after the funeral, Lisa finds Robert in their flat, injured but alive. He was thrown clear of the crash by a lucky twist of fate. He now plans to collect the $120,000 insurance he took out at the airport. Once Lisa collects the money and turns it over to him, she will finally be rid of him. She attempts to get advice from Stewart, but he has been replaced by David Barnes. Lisa's life becomes a tortuous ordeal, at work, at home, faced with a fugitive husband and a growing love for David, who suspects everything. Finally her nightmare concludes when she finally gets the check and meets Robert. As they drive to the Belgian border, he reveals he never intended giving ...
Same Actors
Same Director
Le couteau dans la plaie (1962) Reviews
Decent Sub Hitchcock Fun
I hadn't bothered watching this before because of the negative reviews it always seems to get, but I love Sophia and she made so few decent movies in the genre's I like to watch, that I finally gave it a go, and I was pleasantly surprised I found this to be a very enjoyable sub Hitchcock vehicle Anthony Perkins is very effective as the wheedling, manipulative man child that is his trademark and Gig Young is effectively ambiguous as the smarmy, stranger, who may turn out be an ally or an enemy The movie teases you with possibilities for violence or revelation that come to nothing, so that when something does happen it is all the more of a surprise (Which is considered slow and old fashioned these days, but was par for the course back then) Black and white suits the ambiance that they producers are aiming for, the veneer of French avant guard for a film that aspires to be more than it is, however what it is, is still fine by me PS; - Those who strangely expected Sophia to take her clothes off at some point obviously don't know her very well, as apart from, and perhaps because of, her experiences in her very early days in the movie business, she never does more than undo a couple of top buttons, as she does here
An Unusual Ending For Sophia
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.
Life is a masquerade
Five Miles To Midnight is another of those Alfred Hitchcock type films that could have been a classic had he decided to do them. I think he was busy with The Birds when this came out. Sophia Loren is the star both in billing and performance. She's married to former American GI Anthony Perkins and it's an abusive relationship. Perkins has to take a flight to Casablanca, but the plane crashes near Bordeaux and miracle of miracles he survives but is not found. What a golden opportunity for a little insurance fraud. And a battered Sophia goes along with it. The rest of the film is the masquerade that Loren plays as she pretends he's dead like everyone suspects and what she endures with an increasingly unbalanced Perkins. When Sophia Loren won her Oscar for Two Women she showed her acting chops and this film also has a lot more to do with Sophia the actress than Sophia the sex symbol. As for Anthony Perkins he started out playing callow youths with issues. After Psycho he started out playing far more deranged characters with issues although his character here is descending into a bit of madness unlike Norman Bates who was one fully formed whack job. Other men in Sophia's life are Gig Young and Jean-Pierre Aumont. Won't give any ending away because in the end we don't know what's to become of the main characters most especially Sophia Loren.
Tony is great as always
I just love this movie. It has suspense and a little comedy(even though the film makers may not have intended for there to be). Anthony Perkins was just great as the childish, nightmarish husband of Sophia Loren. Lisa (played by the ever exasperating Sophia Loren) has tired of her immature, infantile husband, Bob (played by the always great Tony Perkins). Well, when Bob travels to Casablanca via plane and Lisa sees in the newspaper that it crashed with no survivors, she's relieved. But guess what? Unfortunately for her (but fortunately for us Tony fans), Bob didn't die! Well, Bob comes back to Lisa unbeknownst to anyone else and bullies Lisa into collecting the insurance money. Overall this is just a great film (even if Sophia is in it). The ending is a shocker, too. One more thing, listen to the film's music; it's really good, too.
One of the most unsatisfying thrillers I've ever seen...
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 ****