FIVE DAYS ONE SUMMER (1982)

After stumbling in the Pyrenees on BEHOLD A PALE HORSE/’64, Fred Zinnemann couldn’t put a foot wrong on his next three (A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS/’66; DAY OF THE JACKAL/’73; JULIA/’77) before stumbling again, now in The Alps on this flat, career closer.  No disgrace, it’s handsomely made and even pulls off a climax where you not only don’t know which of its two leading men has survived, but aren’t sure which you want it to be.  No small trick, that.  But the story of middle-aged married man Sean Connery having an illicit fling with his niece, before meeting the youthful mountain guide she can’t help but notice, doesn’t amount to much, dwarfed by the scenery (Giuseppe Rotunno lensing) and not helped by Michael Austin’s tired dialogue & unilluminating flashbacks.  Zinnemann knew something had gone wrong, he thought it might have been Elmer Bernstein’s rote score.  But the main problem was staring right back at him since while Lambert Wilson (who made a striking cameo debut in JULIA) is both charismatic & sympathetic as the principled mountain guide (and matches up well against a typically powerful Connery), the film simply can’t work without a star-making perf by the young lady in-between the two men, needing a combination of both JULIA’s leading ladies: Jane Fonda’s gaucheness and Vanessa Redgrave’s radiance.  In her debut, Betsy Brantley supplies neither and scuttles whatever chance the film might have had.  A shame as the film grows more interesting as it goes along, the recreation of ‘30s climbing techniques easy to follow and fascinatingly primitive, so too the growing, if reserved antipathy between the two men.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above, Zinnemann’s underseen BEHOLD A PALE HORSE (with Greg Peck, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif) not without interest either.  But, as Zinnemann himself said, Hollywood’s aversion to films set in the cold certainly applied to his two mountain-set efforts.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/behold-pale-horse-1964.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Hedging their bets in Turkey, the distributors came up with their own more commercially acceptable James Bond-like poster for this somber pic.  Yikes!  (Click to expand.)