HOLLYWOOD -- Incest, treated romantically, is the subject of Sean Connery's latest movie, 'Five Days One Summer,' in which his character seduces his own beautiful young niece.
Directed by Academy Award-winner Fred (From Here to Eternity) Zinnemann, the story, set in the 1930s, involves a girl who accompanies her married uncle on a climbing holiday in the Alps.
Because Zinnemann wanted a new, unfamiliar face -- believable as a virginal girl of the era -- he set about auditioning young women with little or no acting experience.
He didn't want audiences associating a known actress, who had been around the block a time or two on screen or in a publicized personal life, spoiling the illusion of virtue.
The actress would be called upon to spend three months on Swiss locations climbing Alpine slopes. Zinnemann, an Austrian native and mountain freak, knew precisely what he wanted and found her in the person of Betsy Brantley.
Betsy, a 25-year-old, blue-eyed brunette, is a North Carolinian who trained for the stage at drama school in London.
Her acting experience was limited to a few roles in the English theater, a five-minute part in a British TV movie and a minor role in 'Shock Treatment,' an English feature film in which even her mother wouldn't recognize her.
It was her performance on a London stage in 'The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas' that drew Zinnemann's attention and subsequently to a reading with the veteran director.
'The interview was unusual,' Betsy said, her accent a curious mixture of the American South and English upperclass.
'The first thing he asked was how I felt about mountains. I knew nothing about the script, but I've loved the mountains all my life. I spent a great deal of time in the Blue Ridge mountains near Rutherfordton, but they're just foothills compared with the Alps and Rockies.
'The highest peak is Mt. Mitchell, which is only 6,000 feet. But people who love mountains develop a highly personalized, emotional response to the tranquility of high altitudes.
'Then Mr. Zinnemann wanted to know if I'd be willing to be suspended from a mountain top. He also asked if I suffered from vertigo. I was beginning to wonder what the film was all about.
'It was important that I share his enthusiasm for mountains. He even showed me pictures of the Alps so he could evaluate my reactions.'
Betsy proved to Zinnemann's satisfaction she was a mountain nut. On that basis, rather than her beauty or talent, she signed for 'Five Days One Summer.'
Soon thereafter she found herself on Piz Palu perched on a glacier 10,000 feet above Italy's Lake Como in the Swiss Alps.
Despite bone-chilling cold and arduous climbs up the face of cliffs, across glaciers and though hip-high drifts, Betsy was enthralled with the awesome beauty and eerie silences of some of the world's most beautiful peaks.
She performed many of her own stunts and much of the climbing with crampons, using an ice ax, leaping crevasses and taking a dangerous fall.
Now that she is down from the moutaintops, Betsy is scaling new heights -- recognition and perhaps fame.
From total obscurity, the willowy actress finds herself in a multimillion-dollar movie performing love scenes with Sean Connery. She is somewhat uncomfortable at the prospect of stardom.
'I'd like to have had my career move a little slower,' Betsy said. 'I find the attention just a bit daunting.
'My family doesn't yell at me anymore and, in places where the movie has been shown, utter strangers approach and start up conversations -- and I never know what to say.
'I don't feel like a celebrity and perhaps I never will. Interviews have taken some getting accustomed to. The most frightening thing about the loss of anonymity is that strangers will know me or know about me.
'Perhaps I'd have been better off with a succession of small roles in a lot of pictures before finding myself in a major motion picture playing love scenes with Sean.'
