Nine Miles to Noon

Dolores Sutton has just remarried, but he son, Peter Lazer takes a dislike to his stepfather, Renato Baldini. He's a construction man with a good business, but between the boy's attitude and Miss Sutton's lack of effort to make the new family dynamic work, Baldini begins to lose patience. Lazer wants his father, who he thinks is dead.... until Morgan Sterne shows up claiming to have known the dead man. It's sort of a lie. He is Mis Sutton's first husband, and he wants Baldini dead, so he can take his wife and his child and enjoy the money. But he manipulates the boy into making the murder attempt.

The movie wears its subtext out in the open so that it lacks any subtlety, but it's interesting to watch the dynamics of the struggle play out against the backdrop of Athens, handsomely shot from Piraeus to the Parthenon to a new, huge development going up. Writer-director Herbert Leder gets a better movie than he perhaps deserves, thanks to the cast and scenery.