Five Days One Summer
Fred Zinnemann, USA, 1982, 35mm, 108m
A passion project that harkened back to Zinnemann’s youthful mountaineering experiences was the basis for his swan song. Undaunted by age (he was 73), Zinnemann made this rugged mountain-climbing drama in the Swiss Alps, returning him to the prewar European genre of the Bergfilm. Set in 1932, it details the unraveling of a covert love affair between a middle-aged doctor (Sean Connery) and his young niece (Betsy Brantley) during an Alpine mountaineering vacation, precipitated by the attentions of their young, attractive mountain guide (Lambert Wilson). Zinnemann’s craftsmanship is impeccable, his narrative skills bring out the emotional ambiguities of the material with typical delicacy, and Fellini cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno’s visuals are, well, majestic.

Followed by:

Julia
Fred Zinnemann, USA, 1977, 35mm, 117m
Zinnemann’s penultimate film explores the test of courage faced by celebrated playwright Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda), whose childhood friend, wealthy heiress Julia (Vanessa Redgrave), asks her to risk her life in the name of the anti-Nazi cause during a trip from Paris to Berlin in 1930s Europe. Dividing its focus between Lillian’s privileged world of the New York literary scene and the world of refugees and the political underground explored by Zinnemann in his 1943 film The Seventh Cross, this moving portrait of friendship and self-sacrifice had all the trappings of the prestige pictures for which Zinnemann was known—and the film duly received multiple Academy Award nominations, with Oscars going to Redgrave, screenwriter Alvin Sargent, and Jason Robards as novelist Dashiell Hammett, Hellman’s lover-mentor. But the provocative casting of two actresses—both reviled in some quarters for their politics—in the lead roles makes Julia more than just a tasteful showcase for great performances and middlebrow drama (and led to a notorious Academy Award acceptance speech by Redgrave). Featuring Maximilian Schell, Hal Holbrook, Rosemary Murphy (as Dorothy Parker), and, in her film debut, a 28-year-old actress by the name of Meryl Streep.