"F" is for Five Minutes to Live

 In some ways, Five Minutes to Live is a distant cousin of a Samuel Fuller movie, specificallly The Naked Kiss. It has that sleazy underbelly of suburbia that David Lynch (arguably) mastered with Blue Velvet, but with the stark black and white aesthetic of early Fuller. I wish I could say that Five Minutes to Live was as good as either of those films, but it has some tasty morsels for fans of quasi-arcane film trivia.

 For example, Five Minutes to Live (also known as The Door to Door Maniac, which makes a lot less sense given the plot) stars Johnny Cash, who also wrote the title song for the movie. It would surprise me to hear that anybody but the most die hard of Johnny Cash fans had ever heard of the movie, let alone the song.:



 To be fair, it's not the most memorable Johnny Cash song you're ever going to hear, but then again his performance isn't that swell, either. Don't get me wrong; Cash shows a lot of enthusiasm as Johnny Cabot, a big city criminal cooling his heels in Camellia Gardens, New Jersey, but his line delivery is a little stilted. He looks more comfortable when he's sitting in his hotel room plucking away at a guitar while his girl (Midge Ware) complains about being stuck in the suburbs.

 Then again, when he finds out that she isn't who she says she is, Cabot (SPOILER) guns her down in cold blood. While his delivery isn't great, Cash does sell the career professional who knows when to be careful and when to be ruthless. It's just when he needs to vocally express it that we run into trouble, but the Man in Black's charisma sneaks out when he's being stoic or casing out a joint.

 Cabot ended up at the wrong job at the wrong time and shot his way out of a police ambush, which is what got him dumped off in Camellia Gardens, a seemingly idyllic small town where the Vice President of the Bank is married to the "Homemaker of the Year." That's where crook Fred Dorella (Vic Tayback) gets the idea to rob an otherwise impregnable bank: he'll handle the husband while Cabot threatens the wife. To ensure everything goes smoothly, they'll call every five minutes or she gets it - hence the title.

 The catch, it turns out, is that it's anything but paradise inside the home of Ken and Nancy Wilson (Donald Woods and Cay Forester) - he's browbeaten about the added stresses being put on him by her job (and the meddlesome town council that put them both where they are) and it frequently boils over behind closed doors. Neither of them have time for their son Bobby (Little Ronnie Howard - oh, did I forget to mention that Ron Howard is in this movie?).

 Here's another point where Five Minutes to Live was a little tricky to get a handle on: while Fred and Johnny are casing the Wilson house, the movie frequently cuts in to their domestic life / morning routine, and it's hard to tell if director Bill Karn (Guns Don't Argue) is going for darkly melodramatic or wryly cynical. It seems like Bobby's observations about his parents and much of their banter is meant to be funny, but the delivery is so earnest that it's more uncomfortable than amusing. Meanwhile, the crooks are sitting outside, trying to comprehend a world where people live by schedules and routines.

 But it gets better - Ken is cheating on his wife  with Ellen Harcourt (Pamela Mason) - unbeknownst to anyone, he thinks. so things get... complicated. Well, not at first: Cabot pretends to be a door-to-door guitar salesman (hence the alternate title to the film) in order to get into the Wilson home. Before long, the killer is flummoxed by her social schedule impeding on their plan and Ken discovers that his dalliance with Ms. Harcourt may not be "their little secret," even as he plans to run away with her later that day. Fred's more than a little surprised that Mr. Wilson says "Suppose you'd be doing me a favor by killing my wife?"

 With a little more finesse, Five Minutes to Live could be another The Naked Kiss, but it hits just shy of the target, a sleazy exploitation film that isn't quite sure what direction it wants to go in. It doesn't surprise me that elements of Five Minutes to Live pop up in movies like The Ref and Bandits, which play to the comedy more and the domestic sleaze less. There are times that, despite its muddled execution, Five Minutes to Live is a bitterly funny movie. At the same time, the more we get to know Cabot around Mrs. Wilson, the more disturbing he becomes.

 There are shades of Frank Booth in the way he handles her and terrorizes her - first singing "Five Minutes to Live" and then grazing her face with a bullet. He harasses her for not "looking right," not because she cares but because he does.  If you ever thought, "you know what would be a good vibe for Johnny Cash? Rape-y!" then you're in luck. It gets even darker than that towards the end, when Bobby shows up - Cabot doesn't like to involve children and a shootout with the police has tragic consequences for the normally cautious "maniac."

 Five Minutes to Live is just shy of being the movie it could be, and even though there's a good reason the film isn't very well known, I'd say more often than not it's worth the watch. The rough spots hold it back, but just because it doesn't find the artful balance between sleaze and cinema, Five Minutes to Live still has a trick or two up its sleeve if you're patient. Check it out, if you're in the mood for something mean spirited and rough around the edges.

Blogorium Review: The Baron of Arizona

The Baron of Arizona, director Samuel Fuller (The Naked Kiss, Pickup on South Street)'s second film, is based on the true story of James Reavis, a clerk in Santa Fe, New Mexico that perpetrated one of the most elaborate hoaxes in U.S. history, claiming that he and his wife were the rightful owners of the territory of Arizona in 1883. Told in flashback by Reavis' antagonist (and, ironically, mentor) John Griff, the film is generally fun - if tonally inconsistent - thanks to Vincent Price's performance as the so-called "Baron of Arizona."

During the 19th century, the U.S. honored land grant titles from the Spanish government, and Reavis saw his opportunity to steal Arizona away by claiming to be the "rightful owner." Reavis spent years constructing his story, creating false tombstones, carving a stone proclamation from Spanish King Ferdinand VI, and falsifying records allowing an orphan he adopted to become Sofia de Peralta, the legal heir of Arizona (not then a state). The Baron of Arizona follows Reavis (Price) from his arrival at the home of Pepito Alvarez (Vladimir Sokoloff), announcing that Alvarez's adopted daughter Sofia (Karen Kester) was the heir of Miguel Peralta - an invention of Reavis.

Reavis hired Loma Morales (Beulah Bondi) to be Sofia's nanny, then leaves Arizona to forge entries in the two existing copies of Ferdinand VI's Land Grants; one in a monastery in Alacantra, Spain, and the other in the Madrid castle of the Marquis de Santella. After three years in the monastery and an undisclosed time living with gypsies, Reavis is reunited with the adult Sofia (Ellen Drew), and proposes marriage to here, the final component of his plan.

The Baron and Baroness Sofia de Peralta-Reavis arrive in Phoenix and lay claim to their land, sending the Department of the Interior into a struggle to prove or disprove their paper trail. The Government sends John Griff (Reed Hadley), an expert on forgery (and author of the book Reavis uses to create the false documents early in the film) to crack the case, while Reavis begins charging railroad companies, businesses, and landowners for the privilege to use "his land," raising the ire of locals.

The Baron of Arizona is hampered from the get-go by a frame story set in 1912, immediately after the territory became a state. A much older John Griff recounts how Reavis almost pulled off his hoax from beginning to end, and the narrative accordingly lacks suspense from the get-go. The audience is privy to every trick that Reavis pulls, every bit of deception he uses, and when Griff arrives in the story, there's no mystery to how the "Baron" crafted his con. There's no point in following Griff as he cracks the case (and to the film's credit, Fuller never tries to deviate from Reavis), but because we know he will be caught and we know how the lie was constructed, it's really a matter of waiting for the ruse to end.

Would the film be more effective had it begun with James and Sofia arriving in Phoenix, laying claim to Arizona, and working backwards? Maybe; I can't say with any certainty because that's critiquing a movie for something it doesn't do rather than the film that is. The lack of narrative tension isn't the only problem, however: the film's reasonably jovial tone takes a sour turn late in the film when mob justice leads to a near lynching of Reavis, a scene that directly follows his admission of guilt to Griff. That, coupled with an eleventh-hour change of heart by Reavis towards Sofia (when he decides he truly does love her, without much clear character development) closes the film out on a "love conquers all note," another tonal shift that The Baron of Arizona doesn't earn.

And yet, I left the film enjoying Fuller's second effort nevertheless; Vincent Price carries the entire film as the conniving, devious, yet charming silver-tongued James Addison Reavis. From the moment we meet him until the very end, Price (who was 39 when the film was made) is a magnetic screen presence, capable of selling the manipulative, power hungry, serial-seducing "Baron" as someone you want to see succeed. When Hadley's John Griff arrives, one can't help but cheer for de Peralta-Reavis, even when we know he's totally in the wrong and shamelessly ripping off Arizona's rightful landowners.

The rest of the cast is a mixed bag: Hadley has a Joseph Cotton quality to him, and he does the best with what amounts to a dual-role (the elderly, wistful statesman, and the cocky investigator determined to take down Reavis). The film's low budget hurts the most with Ellen Drew's grown Sofia de Peralta, who at no point is ever believable as the half-Spanish / half-Native American the Baroness turns out to be. She seems to have flown from New England to central casting in Los Angeles. For his part, I never questioned that Sokoloff - and actor of Russian descent - was anything but an authentic Mexican, which cannot be said of most of the cast members from the "Spanish" section of the film.

Fuller gives The Baron of Arizona some nice touches; while the film was shot in 15 days at the Corrigan Ranch in California (and partially in Arizona), the Spanish monastery looks authentic enough, and despite a few obvious "in studio" shots (and the least convincing "day for night" scene I can remember), one can appreciate the effort to distinguish the movie from other "period" films of the 1950s. While one shouldn't come in expecting the Vincent Price from his Corman years - the slightly campy, heightened version we tend to associate with his performances - he and Fuller do generate some laughs, particularly in a scene of mis-communication between Reavis, Father Guardian (Gene Roth), and local police, that pays off in an appropriately ironic wagon crash.

Criterion included The Baron of Arizona in their Eclipse series The First Films of Samuel Fuller, and I was glad to have seen the film, warts and all. It's not something I might have been aware of otherwise, and it's certainly worth checking out if you want to round out your Vincent Price experience.