Travelogue-tragedy-soap opera set in Greece, London, and New York, all of which look luscious in the wide-screen color photography of 1963. And jeez, what a collection of unhappy principals. Peter Finch, a nice-guy British publishing executive, is miserably married to Angela Lansbury, a contemptuous shrew who suffered the effects of a bad deed of his years before and won't ever let him forget it. He crosses the pond to help out buddy and co-worker Arthur Hill, who's also miserable, being unable to please his much younger, fragile wife, Jane Fonda, who also suffers from being the daughter of self-centered, selfish Constance Cummings. She and Finch respond to each other's temperaments and mutual love of Greece, and they're off to Athens and Mykonos and other well-photographed spots, along with Lansbury, who continues to make Finch miserable and pursues an affair, as things heat up between him and Fonda. For a soap, it's unusually literate, and also unusually visual, what with all the island-hopping, and I find it compelling, if a downer. All the actors are good, and Fonda and Lansbury are rather better than that. It's compromised by an abrupt, depressing ending, and the MGM orchestra saws away more than it has to. But I, too, am surprised to find it has only a 5.0 rating on the IMDB, and I'd urge fans of literate melodrama, and 1960s time capsules, to give it a look the next time TCM shows it.
Review of In the Cool of the Day
