Miami Beach, Jennifer O'Neill, Jewel Heist, Cool Imported Cars
Lady Ice (1973) stars gangly and odd-looking leading man Donald Sutherland (father of Kiefer) as an insurance investigator looking into the theft of three million dollars worth of stolen jewels. His method is infiltration. He gets a job as a mechanic at the import car dealership in Miami owned by the father (Patrick Magee) of his chief suspect, Paula Booth (Jennifer O'Neill), a fence who has the jewels turned into necklaces and bracelets, et cetera. She works with Eddie (Jon Cypher) and the debonair Peter (Eric Braeden), with whom she has a rendezvous in Nassau, the Bahamas.
The film, considering its locations, has a lovely sun-drenched look. The dark blue Maserati driven by Jennifer O'Neill looks like the quintessence of a breezy cool lifestyle, the driver herself one of the most beautiful women in films; long brown hair, a face with features arranged seemingly as a special project by God. She plays with the men in the movie; three of them act like her boyfriend, but one, Andy Hammond (Sutherland) gets the impression she's uncommitted to everyone and everything except her father and her job--getting jewels from point A to point B, a disappearer of precious objects.
The film unfolds well without showing its cards except gradually. Andy Hammond is a cocky, mysterious man who seems to be a jewel thief, in an early scene taking at gunpoint a diamond necklace--part of the main jewel hoard--from an overweight sweaty courier. He makes the man strip to his underwear, revealing the necklace taped to the man's chest. With this item, he has an in with Paula Booth. She reveals to her father that his former mechanic has the necklace. They scramble to try to figure out who this guy is, what he wants.
Throughout much of the movie, I wondered about this, too. I have a hard time following the plot flow of mystery films or TV shows. Perry Mason was always far ahead of me--I was mostly interested in the clothes, cars, office spaces, Della Street played by Barbara Hale, the incredible losing record of the D.A. character, Hamilton Berger.
Similarly, the surface features of Lady Ice left me interested throughout. In American cinema of the first half of the 1970s, easy solutions tended to not be applied to movies. Lady Ice ends with a failure--Paula Booth loses out after all her work; Andy Hammond, after pursuing this gorgeous and slippery fence, loses the jewels he was supposed to recover as they're taken away by the father's henchmen led by Paula's former boyfriend, Eddie. The film ends with a merry go round boat chase seen from high above, as the FBI chases Eddie and his men, a pursuit that will end when the target boat runs out of gas.
It's an ending, in other words, hanging suspended, not completely resolved, with the addition of Hammond and Booth on a Bahamian beach laughing hard at the loss of the jewels, and also the lifting of pressure from them as that's now placed on the three thieves stuck with the goods.
Overall, a pretty good film.
Vic Neptune
Lady Ice (1973) stars gangly and odd-looking leading man Donald Sutherland (father of Kiefer) as an insurance investigator looking into the theft of three million dollars worth of stolen jewels. His method is infiltration. He gets a job as a mechanic at the import car dealership in Miami owned by the father (Patrick Magee) of his chief suspect, Paula Booth (Jennifer O'Neill), a fence who has the jewels turned into necklaces and bracelets, et cetera. She works with Eddie (Jon Cypher) and the debonair Peter (Eric Braeden), with whom she has a rendezvous in Nassau, the Bahamas.
The film, considering its locations, has a lovely sun-drenched look. The dark blue Maserati driven by Jennifer O'Neill looks like the quintessence of a breezy cool lifestyle, the driver herself one of the most beautiful women in films; long brown hair, a face with features arranged seemingly as a special project by God. She plays with the men in the movie; three of them act like her boyfriend, but one, Andy Hammond (Sutherland) gets the impression she's uncommitted to everyone and everything except her father and her job--getting jewels from point A to point B, a disappearer of precious objects.
The film unfolds well without showing its cards except gradually. Andy Hammond is a cocky, mysterious man who seems to be a jewel thief, in an early scene taking at gunpoint a diamond necklace--part of the main jewel hoard--from an overweight sweaty courier. He makes the man strip to his underwear, revealing the necklace taped to the man's chest. With this item, he has an in with Paula Booth. She reveals to her father that his former mechanic has the necklace. They scramble to try to figure out who this guy is, what he wants.
Throughout much of the movie, I wondered about this, too. I have a hard time following the plot flow of mystery films or TV shows. Perry Mason was always far ahead of me--I was mostly interested in the clothes, cars, office spaces, Della Street played by Barbara Hale, the incredible losing record of the D.A. character, Hamilton Berger.
Similarly, the surface features of Lady Ice left me interested throughout. In American cinema of the first half of the 1970s, easy solutions tended to not be applied to movies. Lady Ice ends with a failure--Paula Booth loses out after all her work; Andy Hammond, after pursuing this gorgeous and slippery fence, loses the jewels he was supposed to recover as they're taken away by the father's henchmen led by Paula's former boyfriend, Eddie. The film ends with a merry go round boat chase seen from high above, as the FBI chases Eddie and his men, a pursuit that will end when the target boat runs out of gas.
It's an ending, in other words, hanging suspended, not completely resolved, with the addition of Hammond and Booth on a Bahamian beach laughing hard at the loss of the jewels, and also the lifting of pressure from them as that's now placed on the three thieves stuck with the goods.
Overall, a pretty good film.
Vic Neptune
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