With all of the attention paid to Johnny Cash in the past couple of years, making him the country singer you can actually admit to liking without fear that less-open minded people will think you're a redneck, it's surprising that his acting debut, the 1961 feature Five Minutes to Live, hasn't gotten much attention. I
could see ignoring it if it were a bad film, but it's actually a well-made, grim, taut crime drama that deserves wider acclaim. In fact, it' so good that my friend Sam named his grey market video site after it. Nope, instead, I find Five Minutes to Live at a dollar store (!), paired with the Cash-starring TV movie The Pride of Jesse Hallum. Not that I mind shelling out a mere four bits for a good movie, but, well, where's the justice? In Five Minutes, Cash stars as Johnny Cabot, a guitar-playing small-time hood who begins the film on the lam with his shady dame girlfriend. He meets up with bank robber Vic Tayback and the pair team up to rob a bank, hostage-style. Cabot will hold the wife of one of the bank execs captive in their home while Tayback talks the hubby into cashing a highly dubious check. Little do they know that the husband (Donald Woods) has plans of his own involving his mistress and an extended trip to Vegas that night. Tayback gives him the deal while Cash serenades the wife (Cay Forrester) with the title track to the film, makes her dress up in lingerie and throws her all over the house. Hubby is torn, and much of the film is an tense race against the clock as Cash and the wife wait anxiously to see if Tayback will actually make the call that saves her. It's a fairly simply plot, but director Bill Karn (Ma Barker's Killer Brood) keeps things on edge, and the performances are good enough to make even the most corrupt characters (that is, most of them) seem compelling. Cash is fine, snarling his way through a sadistic part, and seems infinitely more at home than, say, Roy Orbison in The Fastest Guitar Alive. Things get dark, though they never get too dark, even when a 7-year-old Ron Howard shows up as the couple's son and manages to find his way in the middle of a gunfight. The dollar store print of Five Minutes looks okay--it's certainly more watchable that many buck films I've picked up. Still, I'd like to see a nice, remastered version of this with some extras. It's an enjoyably gritty crime thriller that ranks as better than many of the similarly low-budget indie heist films at the time, and would be worth checking out even if it weren't for Johnny Cash's acting debut. (It would still have Vic Tayback, for one, who was 31 at the time and looks 50.)
February 12, 2006
