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TOURISTA The Robert Stevens-directed soaper In the Cool of the Day has received a deserving honor—being named one of Ed Margulies and Stephen Rebello’s Bad Movies We Love. Their review, listed under the chapter title “No, But I Saw the Book,” gives you the screamer details, so I’ll only provide what they don’t. Jane Fonda looks diuretic—much beyond what’s required for her character, who’s suffering from the fear of her mother and from one of those mysterious movie diseases. (You’d be too if you were married to Arthur Hill.) With her puffy face, swept brows and perpetual bad hair dayz, she’s almost oriental in an Anne Heywood sort of way, and she hardly seems to know what to do with her limbs. As Peter Finch’s scarred wife, Angela Lansbury, in pink and orange and lavender ensembles, entertains as a cross-pollination of Dorothy Malone and Constance Ford, the latter very clearly present during her exit sequence in which she’s packing her suitcases while telling Finch she’s off to engage in a cathartic affair with lounge lizard Nigel Davenport. As usual, Finch is the prince of urbanity, though here he occasionally suggests Edmund O’Brien. (Like Deborah Kerr, Finch got trapped in his share of stinkers: in addition to this one, he also did Stevens’ I Thank a Fool the year before, and there’s Elephant Walk, The Sins of Rachel Cade, The Legend of Lylah Clare, the musical Lost Horizon, Judith, The Nelson Affair and The Abdication.) This tourista special sanctifies the adultery between Fonda and Finch only after they’ve been accused of what they haven’t yet done, so of course Fonda’s in-remission illness flares to punish the lovers. If only Angela had reappeared at the end to put a new bitch low to “I told you so!” (After all, Stevens gave Diane Cilento her lowest imaginable moment in I Thank a Fool.) Lots of smoking and travelogue shots of Greek antiquity and columns. Costumes by Pierre Balmain and Orry-Kelly. Produced by John Houseman, who the previous year did the same duty for what is indeed one of the baddest movies impossible not to enjoy, Two Weeks in Another Town.
Text COPYRIGHT © 2001 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
