Madame Bijoux

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.

A made-for-TV `Thomas Crown Affair (1968)' tries hard to duplicate the Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway chemistry, using Donald Sutherland and Jennifer O'Neill in this watery version.

Role reversal sets O'Neill as the wealthy jewel thief, hunted seductively by insurance investigator Sutherland..who works most of the film in shirts open to the navel…Ahh, the 70's!!!

O'Neill is beautiful and stylish, drives fast cars, swims unclothed and stays away from complex sentences, while Sutherland smokes those little thin cigars and from time to time falls back on his ‘Hawkeye' grin. There is a nice turn by Jon Cypher as the heavy. Soap opera vet Eric Braeden gets some on-screen time as does, of all people Robert Duvall as the straight-arrow cop.

Fun for a lark. Connoisseurs of the genre only please .

Jennifer O'Neill became a star as the distant object of Gary Grimes' voyeuristic attention in the wonderfully nostalgic Summer of '42. That film showed that she could be captivating when viewed from afar, but her career went off the rails while she was still in her twenties owing to a shortage of technical chops. Simply put, she had the looks of a movie star but not the presence. Here we see Jennifer driving around Miami in a 1970 Maserati Ghibli, taking a late night swim, sunning herself in a bikini, flying off to the Bahamas... Mansions, speedboats, planes and jewels provide the rest of Lady Ice's eye candy. It's all very appealing to look at, but herein lies the problem. The movie is all surface gloss with nothing underneath to drive the wheels. Someone forgot to tell the producers that heist movies are crime thrillers, and crime thrillers are plot driven. They need tight pacing, high stakes, plot twists, none of which appear in this film. The only action is provided by a little routine fast driving. Otherwise, everything meanders along in predictable fashion. Some greedy people are interested in some jewels. No surprises here. The producers could have recut Lady Ice as a four minute music video or an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and lost nothing.

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