Friday's Old Fashioned: Green Ice (1981)

“Green Ice” begins with a gruesome massacre and segues directly into a jaunty meet cute between some sort of vaguely defined idea American man, Joe Wiley (Ryan O’Neal), who ironically has wound up in Mexico for a lack of a better idea and a wealthy American heiress, Lillian Holbrook (Anne Archer), who has also wound up south of the border. It’s evocative of the oddball blend of this 1981 adventure-thriller, one that has a score composed by Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, meaning that at one point we hear “Green Ice’s” attempt at a “Greatest American Hero”-like theme song composed by the man who played bass on “Let It Bleed,” and one in which Joe and Lillian get involved with Colombian revolutionaries while also plotting to steal the emerald diamonds of Lillian’s would-be fiancé Meno Argenti (Omar Sharif) from his ostensibly impenetrable vault. “Green Ice” was directed by Ernest Day, who came to prominence as a cinematographer, which is ironic given how the four-person screenplay based on a novel is overflowing with exposition. Not that I entirely minded. When Argenti explains his security protocols to Joe on a tour of his emerald-holding skyscraper stronghold, Sharif does so with real relish in his words and a gleam in his eye, like he’s daring Joe to try and break in.

Joe does break in, of course, intending to use the loot to help fund the Colombian rebels, and does so via hot air balloon, like “The Wizard of Oz” in reverse, which strangely, no one mentions. If the revolutionary subplot never feels like it has real weight, the heist sequence does via strictly diegetic sound, practical effects, and deliberate shot length. It’s gripping, and even more so when you grade it on a curve in comparison to our over-stimulated modern standards. On the other hand, the central relationship between Joe and Lillian is not just devoid of romance and tension but ultimately comes across a little too much like John Cleese and Jamie Lee Curtis in “A Fish Called Wanda” without noticing. The biggest laugh in the whole movie is when Archer is forced to say her character is falling in love with Joe which merely reminded me of Roger Ebert’s classic line describing Cleese and Curtis’ relationship: “This illustrates a universal law of human nature, which is that every man, no matter how resistible, believes that when a woman in a low-cut dress tells him such things she must certainly be saying the truth.”