Five Golden Hours is a 1961 Italian-British comedy film directed by Mario Zampi and written by Hans Wilhelm, starring Ernie Kovacs, Cyd Charisse and George Sanders, and featuring Dennis Price and John Le Mesurier.
GENRE : Colorized Comedy Movie.
BRIEF PLOT & FULL REVIEW :
A petty crook gallantly consoles wealthy widows and is doing all right in his chosen profession until he meets and falls in love with a lovely baroness, who knows all about get-rich-quick schemes.
Ernie Kovacs stars with Cyd Charisse in this film. Those Five hours in fact are the time differential between Rome and New York where Cyd Charisse's late husband used to trade on the Stock Exchange and made a bundle with the instant communications before Rome's trading opened. In point of fact the guy was a con man with a Ponzi scheme.
A petty crook is doing all right in his chosen profession of gallantly consoling wealthy widows--until he meets and falls in love with a lovely baroness who knows all about get-rich-quick schemes. The crook evolves an ingenious swindle geared to the time differential between New York and Rome and works it on his string of widows, but the baroness takes off with the dough. The crook flees to a mental home to escape the wrath of his victims.
I believe Kovacs said this was his favorite film. It's a quiet, measured comedy with good production values. It was the only real film in which Kovacs was the lead. I've always been interested in the big Hungarian, so any Kovacs movie has a built-in appeal for me. If you're not a fan of his, you might find Five Golden Hours ho-hum. Kovacs was never served that well on celluloid. His forte was exploring the possibilities of television, where he had freedom. With films, he was being packaged as a Hollywood product - not much room for Kovacs creativity there. He made one more film after this one, Sail a Crooked Ship, which had some laughs.
Aldo Bondi (Ernie Kovacs) is an assistant undertaker in a small town in the hills of southern Italy. He starts off basically as a gigolo (albeit a Platonic one), supplementing his income with donations from grieving widows that he meets and comforts at the funerals he arranges.
Unfortunately for him, he falls badly for one of them, Baronessa Sandra (gorgeous Cyd Charisse). At a party at her modern villa, he hears from the upper-crust guests, all of whom are male, about a scam pulled on them by the Baronessa's late husband called the Five Golden Hours. He is fascinated by the con, which convinces the marks that it takes advantage of the five hour time difference between Italy and the New York Stock Exchange but is actually a Ponzi scheme.
He decides to try it himself, and although things start out well, as soon as the Baronessa betrays his trust, things go from bad to worse. Aldo goes from the frying pan to the fire to between a rock and a hard place. Every creative stratagem he thinks of, while it does extricate him from the current predicament, ultimately lands him in an even worse one.
This is a black comedy in many ways, not a wild, wacky, joke-a-second riot like the Marx Brothers. It reminds me more of Alec Guiness's Ealing comedies or Peter Sellers's films from the late fifties and early sixties. The laughs are not in one-liners or sight gags, but in the development of the plot and characters and particularly the increasingly outlandish situations in which they find themselves. The spectacular town and mountain scenery of Italy also add to the enjoyment.
Great acting, many laughs and no cursing. This is what great movies are made of! Such a laid back, beautiful era.
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It is a common misconception that the colors in this movie are the original source color, or that the original source material had audio, or that these enhanced faces are genuine. When it comes to colorizing a black and white movie, the AI app can only speculate on colors and introduce new pixels, resulting in artificial but visually appealing colors, and facial contours, based on the coding set.
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