Ernest Day’s Green Ice may be most
notable for being the movie playing in a mall theatre in Chantal Akerman’s Golden
Eighties, making a small but cherishable contribution to Akerman's exploration
of its era’s not-so-golden ideology. Day's film, in (extreme) contrast, doesn’t provide much to think
over, being a blandly shapeless mishmash of elements. Omar Sharif plays Meno
Argenti, an expatriate Italian who’s a bigshot in the Colombian emerald racket,
while primarily focused on getting back into his first love of the diamond market, from
which he was exiled for past transgressions; to that end, he strategically
romances the highly-connected Holbrook (Anne Archer), but she’s more interested
in aiding the cause of the rebels he exploits (the passages with the rebels,
while hardly politically daring, are at least among the film’s more relatively
meaningful). An under-achieving electrical engineer, Joseph Wiley (Ryan O’Neal)
gets drawn in, as people do, eventually leading to a daring heist on Argenti’s supposedly
impenetrable emerald-hoarding fortress, and various subsequent showdowns. As in
a movie like The Tamarind Seed (another use of Sharif as all-purpose
foreigner, in that instance Russian), Maurice Binder’s title sequence is easily
the most visually striking aspect of the experience, while bearing no stylistic
or thematic relationship to anything in the movie proper. Day (better known as
a cinematographer) shows himself to be a wondrously perfunctory director, with even
the supposed visual highlights counting for little or nothing. Other oddities
include a (not generally very helpful) score by Bill Wyman, and the casting of
Philip Stone (the barman from The Shining) as one of Sharif’s heavies, the
Kubrickian resonances wondrously out of place here. O’Neal and Sharif (both at
the end of their heydays, and rightly so on this evidence) deliver startlingly
dull, disengaged performances. We can safely assume that the mall theatre I mentioned
would have had few satisfied customers that week…
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