FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE

It's a hard film to find, but if the prospect of seeing a twitchy, bug-eyed Johnny Cash use six-year-old Ron Howard as a human shield during a violent shootout sounds promising, then Five Minutes to Live delivers in spades. This long-lost picture starts off with Cash riddling a policeman with machine gun bullets and never lets up, piling one raw act upon another with the Man in Black turning in a wild performance as a feral killer. In nearly every scene Johnny is either wielding a weapon or obsessively strumming an acoustic guitar (the tasty riffs he picks were post-dubbed by co-star Merle Travis), and Cash channels something very dark and very disturbed in this role. He nearly trembles with his aggression, and it's clear that if Cash hadn't been the seminal music figure that he was, he could have had a fine career as a Hollywood heavy. Director Bill Karn gives Five Minutes to Live a breathless, desperate energy that transcends its obvious exploitation roots, sometimes coming close to capturing the same vibe as Russ Meyer's early black-and-white melodramas. The film also takes a healthy satirical poke at the sterile face of suburbia, a theme that hadn't yet become standard in American cinema. The Wilsons put on a good show for the neighbors but their lives are a mess of hangovers, adultery, and lazy parenting. When Johnny arrives he makes his disdain for their lifestyle plain, muttering "I never saw so much of nothin' in my life," and smashing the tacky knick-knacks that decorate the Wilson home. There are a few loose plot devices that need tightening, but with a film that moves this fast and furious, it hardly matters. By the time this thriller was re-released (with the lurid moniker Door-to-Door Maniac), Cash was on his way toward cleaning up his own troubled life and embracing Christianity, which might explain why such a vicious portrait remains difficult to see. However, while Johnny Cash's larger-than-life persona depends on his image as an elder statesman of American folk music, there are plenty who still relish his early hell-raising days, and Five Minutes to Live is the film that those fans need to see. FRED BELDIN