He’s a goddamn door-to-door maniac!
He’s a milky faced, baby-faced cruel psychopath of a guitar-strumming KILLER.
It’s our favorite warbler–Johnny Cash, in the late noir thriller Five Minutes to Live, directed by Ludlow Flower, Jr., who cast his wife Cay Forrester in the role of imperiled housewife Nancy Wilson.
Definitely late noir: it came out in 1961, but up and down and all throughout it feels like 1951. It feels like the sleek, low-slung vehicles of 1961 and the women’s bangs and bobs and sidesweeps of 1961 and the all trappings of 1961 were somehow, mysteriously, sent back in time to 1951.
Cash turns in a quietly warbly performance as Johnny Cabot, who is baby-faced and creepily misogynistic when he tosses Mrs. Wilson’s ceramics onto the floor and when he forces her to strip and put on a negligee and when he pulls out her hairpins, saying, “Remove your artillery.”
And it’s free, all free.
