Set in 1932, middle aged doctor Douglas Meredith (Sean Connery) and his young female traveling companion Kate Meredith (Betsy Brantley) whom he introduces as his wife arrive in the Swiss Alps for a mountain climbing trip. Over the course of their trip, the two are guided by local mountain guide Johann (Lambert Wilson) and overtime certain aspects of their relationship are revealed.
Director Fred Zimmerman, known for such classics as Day of the Jackal and High Noon made Five Days One Summer combining the Kay Boyle short story, Maiden, Maiden with an Austrian Alps folk tale about an old woman whose missing bridegroom was discovered in a glacier. The film was a passion project for Zimmerman as he had fond memories of the mountains in his native Austria and wanted to capture that grandeur on screen. With extensive location shooting, dust blown from the Sahara turning the mountains orange, storms destroying extensive set dressings, and even crewmembers discovering the frozen body of a man who had been missing for thirty-one years, preserved in the ice at a prospective location Five Days One Summer was a tumultuous production to say the least. Coming in at a final budget of around $17 million what scant sources I gathered indicate the film's final gross never cracked $200,000. Critical reception was equally harsh with many lambasting the film as trite melodrama that didn't emotionally resonate (it probably didn't help that a major aspect of Douglas and Kate's relationship was hidden in the marketing). It's unfortunate the movie went through so much hell during production because that makes the end product all the more tragic that it doesn't work.
I'll say that Five Days One Summer does look quite gorgeous as Zimmerman shows a clear love for the Alps with the shots of these imposing locales lovingly captured in a way in which the enormity is well-conveyed to the audience. The setting is also nicely recreated with a solid eye for period details. Elmer Bernstein's musical score is also very haunting and moody. The main crux of the movie however is in the love story aspect and unfortunately not only is it not a good love story as its rather passionless and muted with these characters often feeling lost amongst the vastness captured by Zimmerman, but there's a major element involving incest between an uncle and niece that was carefully hidden in the marketing materials that isn't treated with the gravity it should be and feels like it's used more for shock value than to make any character or thematic point because if you were to take away the incest element nothing about this story would change. The same can also be said of a sequence halfway through the film where Kate, Douglas, and Johann find a frozen corpse in the snow and like the incest it's completely incident and has an air of "so what?" because it's something that just happens without actually tying back to the main story.
Five Days One Summer is a mostly forgotten film in Zimmerman's filmography, and unfortunately time hasn't improved or recontextualized what critics and audiences rejected in 1982. While the actors do what they can with the material, Five Days One Summer is a slow, boring, and curiously flat love story that only occasionally sputters to life with things like the incest reveal, the frozen corpse, or the occasional mountaineering hazard. A disappointing not for Zimmerman to end his career on.
