Jane Fonda was one of the stars in this year's Summer Under the Stars on TCM. That gave me the chance to record the movie In the Cool of the Day, not having done a post on it before. Recently, I watched it to do a post on it here.
Fonda, wearing a God-awful black wig, plays Christine Bonner, a young woman with some sort of chronic health issue with her lungs married to New York-based editor Sam (Arthur Hill). Sam is from a fairly well-to-do background, considering the fashionable Westchester County house his father (Alexander Knox in a brief role) lives in. Coming over to visit for some sort of business is Sam's London-based colleague Murray Logan (Peter Finch). Somehow it gets suggested that Sam and Christine come over to visit and perhaps do some traveling together.
Unfortunately, nobody here has a happy marriage. Christine, as I mentioned, is ill although it doesn't really show until the end of the movie. She feels she needs a meek husband which Sam provides, even if it's not a marriage with much love in it. Murray has marriage difficulties, too, although of a different kind. He and his wife Sybil (Angela Lansbury) had a child together, but the family got in a car accident one evening. The kid died and Sybil was left with scars that she notices even if the rest of us don't. And she blames Murray for it.
So you can probably guess what happens the next time Murray and Christine meet, which is that they begin to develop feelings for each other. Complicating things is the fact that Sam had to stay behind in New York thanks to his father having a health issue. Still, the Logans decide to go forward with their plans for a trip to Greece, with Christine tagging along sans husband. It seems rather awkward to me, but what do I know?
This being a Studio Era movie, it turns out I knew a fair bit. Of course Murray and Christine's feelings for each other are going to deepen, especially when you see that Sybil is increasingly shrews and seems like she doesn't even want to be on this trip at all. Apparently there's somebody out there who doesn't want to see Greece at all.
Eventually Sybil meets another Englishman, Leonard (Nigel Davenport), who is nice to her and she decides to go running off with him to the Riviera, leaving Murray and Christine to see the beautiful sights of Greece alone together. But Sybil also decides she's going to write to everybody and tell her her opinion of what she's seen between Murray and Christine. This ticks off Christine's mother (Constance Cummings) enough that she flies over to Greece to see Christine, who clearly doesn't want to see her mother.
One day Murray and Sybil are preveted from seeing the sights by a rainstorm. This is considered somehow extremely dangerous for Christine's health, for no good reason other than we need her to fall ill for the purpose of the plot. Sure enough the couple drives around in the rain (and not even in a convertible), and disaster ensues.
Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury haven't had anything good to say about In the Cool of the Day, and I can't say that I blame theme. It's a pallid mess of a movie that has a whole lot of nothing going on, feeling like it's overlong even though it runs less than 90 minutes. You especially have to feel for Jane being forced to wear that awful wig for no good reason. There was location shooting on Greece, but the cinematography doesn't look as good as it might have.
In the Cool of the Day is one of those movies to watch only if you're a completist of one of the cast members, or if you want to see how a movie can go badly wrong.
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