Madame Bijoux

Never quite gets off the ground ... sutherland plays his usual wisecracking self and jennifer o'neill pretty much matches wits with him while jon cypher plays the heavy ... robert duvall didn't quite match up to the role of a real fbi investigator ... jewel thieves always have the problem of where to sell the stolen goods and usually the insurance company is the best bet for a good payoff... its too obvious

Andy Hammon (Donald Sutherland) steals a diamond necklace from a criminal type. He's a newly hired mechanic working for Paul Booth. He gets fired after flirting with the bosses' daughter Paula Booth (Jennifer O'Neill). They get into a car chase and he offers her the $3M necklace. It turns out that the Booths are fences working with Peter Brinker (Eric Braeden). Police detective Ford Pierce (Robert Duvall) is frustrated with Andy Hammon who is actually working with the insurance companies looking to collect his 10%.

It's a lot of Florida. It's a lot of sunshine and water. It's trying to be a stylish thriller. It seems to be spending a chunk of change. Sutherland seems to be playing around with the material. It has the potential but it ends up as a muddle. There are questionable choices all the way through the movie. I don't know why they are measuring the jewels in a moving RV other than injecting some unnecessary action. I don't know why the plot goes from Florida to Chicago. I'm never certain what is happening at any one time. I look up director Tom Gries and am not surprised that he is mostly a TV director. He's trying to give the visual style but doesn't have the skills to pull it off. That's the movie in a nutshell. It's trying to be a flashy big budget thriller but it doesn't have it.

Is this a great movie? Well, no, it's not. But what's really amazing here is that we are able to see it at all. Thanks, Prime! As a kid in the 70s and 80s, and continuing on as a young adult into the 90s, I was pretty sure I had watched just about every action/adventure/cops&robbers flick that came out between 1960 and 1995. At least the ones that had any kind of a star. I had never even heard of this one until I saw it available included with Prime. It's the kind of movie I would have loved as a kid. At this point, I'm sophisticated enough in my judgement of a film to realize that this one is a mess. And while many of the plot points don't seem to make a lot of sense, the film moves along steadily towards what you imagine will be some kind of an interesting conclusion. The ending, along with many other parts of the film is a bit strange, but somehow satisfying. Not much of this movie goes as expected. It's uneven, but it does keep you more interested that a standard formulaic offering. I really enjoyed the performances of the three main stars. Donald Sutherland is sure fun to watch, even if the character did something no real person would ever do about every ten minutes. Jennifer O'Neill has a great energy in every movie I've seen her in. Robert Duvall! He was super solid in a movie where everything else was kind of all over the place. To really enjoy a movie like this, a big part of it has to come from just wanting to see what was going on in the business in 1973. What did the world look like? How was everyone dressing? What were they driving? What were these actors doing in between making really good movies? If you've got an inquiring mind, and really want to know, check this movie out. If not, try something from the 90s.

Dr. Bombay is wrong about this film being made for TV.

It was always intended to be a feature, produced by the General Electric subsidiary, Tomorrow Entertainment. It suffered along the way from problems with the script and was delayed several times.

Alan Trustman, a lawyer and the author of the film, remained mostly in Boston during development, which hindered the process of fixing the script.

While Tomorrow Entertainment did indeed produce many fine TV movies, Lady Ice was one of two features developed by the company. The other was Gravy Train, a bit of cult classic. After the limited success of these films the company concentrated on TV movies.

Though there were times when I enjoyed Donald Sutherland's cheeky, rebellious, style of characterisation, for the most part I never really understood why he was such a success. Versatile he isn't, and here though easily stealing the limelight, he does very little with a weak plot, a thinly spread story and a co-star who smiles a lot! He is insurance investigator "Andy" who robs a gangster of a necklace which he then uses to try to lure "Paula" (Jennifer O'Neill) into disclosing her secrets as a highly effective jewel fencer. Of course, she isn't that dumb - even if she is the crook in question, and so for the next ninety minutes we plays a sort of cat and mouse game between the two that errs all too often on the side of predictable romance. It's all rather flat and by-the-numbers with an underwhelming Robert Duvall and an out of sorts Patrick Magee both failing to add much lustre to this not very shiny drama. It's got made for television written all over it, and I was frankly rather bored by it all. Maybe fans of Sutherland might enjoy it to complete a list, but it has little else to recommend it, sorry.