Five Minutes to Live (1961)

Great Film overall

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

That was a great idea to get Johnny Cash as a killer who plays guitar before violent action on his victims (remember Lino Ventura in Pensione Edelweiss). Cash wasn't really prepared for acting (see his scene when he learns what bank he and his partner are going to rob, he's completely dull). But when he takes the director's bank wife as a hostage, he becomes a complete psycho and he is quite frightening, but he still lacks some real madness to reach the top (remember Arch Hall Jr in the Sadist). Imagine Timothy Carey instead.The other very fine casting is Merle Travis guitar we hear all through the movie. When Jonny Cash plays guitar, it is Merle Travis we hear and sometimes we see his hands. Merle Travis plays a virtuoso and strong guitar sound which matches perfectly with the scenes : Johnny Cash plays fascinating guitar and then gets violent. And the title song is very cynical. These are the best scenes of that very minor heist movie. The heist in itself isn't exciting at all and the ending is a complete change of tone in comic style, and we get the kid Ron Howard stealing the scene with a big laugh.So, Johnny Cash is the main attraction of this minor heist movie that would have deserved better script and direction. The noir director of photography Carl Guthrie is quite disappointing here, but don't miss the intro, I love the final close-up.

I am pretty confident that most viewers will find the basic plot of "Five Minutes to Live" (a.k.a. "Door To Door Maniac") pretty familiar - it's been done many times on TV and in other movies. But I didn't mind the familiarity too much, since in the right hands the formula can still be effective. Unfortunately, this retelling was not done with the right hands. It's a pretty poorly plotted retelling, for one thing. There are a few promising ideas here (one taken from an O. Henry short story), but the movie doesn't take these ideas to too much of an extreme. Also, it takes almost 40% of the movie before the hostage is taken hostage, and then it takes forever for the actual robbery to start being executed. Maybe this wouldn't be too bad had there been some suspense along the journey, but there is precious little, one reason being that Johnny Cash (in his motion picture debut) isn't very good as the hostage taker. His performance wavers all over the place, suggesting that the director didn't give him that much steady direction. Cash's acting did improve in subsequent years, so if you are a Cash fan, I would suggest you look at one of his later acting roles instead of this cheap and tacky outing.

Originally released in 1961 as Five Minutes to Live, this low-budget crime drama was later re-released as Door-to-Door Maniac. Fred narrates the film in flashback, detailing a suburban bank robbery that goes awry. In his simple plan, he hires a hard-up hood, Johnny Cabot to take the wife of the bank's vice president hostage. Cabot will hold her until he gets a call alerting him that Fred has been successful in getting ransom money. Cabot waits, and watches the Wilson house as the husband leaves for the bank and their young son heads off to school. Posing as a door- to-door guitar instructor, he forces his way into the house and takes Nancy Wilson hostage. At the bank, Fred talks his way into Ken Wilson's office, and presents his personal check for $70,000, intending that Wilson will withdraw the funds to cover the check as a ransom for his wife. He has Wilson call home to prove that Nancy is being held by the unstable Cabot, and gives Wilson 5 minutes to make his decision.Not a great film. Johnny Cash can't act at all and he brings down the production. The prints of this film currently look like they were lifted off a TV -- kine-scope fashion which makes it hard to watch. The characters are broadly drawn and dated.Opie is in the movie too and his scene plays like a TV commercial.In all, just not so good.

This movie plays like a low-rent version of the Desperate Hours. The plot involves crooks who invade the home of a bank manager and hold his wife hostage while they force him to rob his own bank. This would be just another drive-in programmer were it not for the fact that none other than Johnny Cash plays the psycho who terrorizes the bank manager's wife and his restless energy is compulsively watchable. He strums his guitar and sneers. He makes lewd remarks to the June-Cleaver wife. He knocks over her knick-knacks and threatens to kill her every five minutes.He appears to rape her, though being a film from the early sixties, it was implied, rather than shown, thank goodness. (Who wants to see Johnny Cash rape a woman?) The movie itself is routine.