Customer Reviews

Le Combat dans l'ile (Fire and Ice)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My favorite Romy Schneider movies are the ones that she made in the fifties in Austria and Germany and in the sixties in France.

This is one of the better movies from the early sixties when she was still engaged to French superstar Alain Delon living and working in France.

"Le combat dans l'ile" is even today very watchable (something I cannot say about her later French movies with Michel Piccoli or Yves Montand). I watched it several times over the past three decades and still love it.

Definitely 5 stars!

Another tip: "Purple Noon" aka "Plein soleil" with Alain Delon from 1960, the best Ripley adaptation based on Patricia Highsmith's 5 Ripley novels. Although Romy is only in one short scene, I still would like to recommend this unforgettable French masterpiece by René Clément.

[...]

The score is very haunting.

A pretty black and white suspense film. Good, not great. I think it would have been improved by eliminating the narration.

Minor nouvelle vague thriller, January 23, 2008

La Combat Dans L'Ile/Fire and Ice is a minor nouvelle vague political thriller from Alan Cavalier, who became overshadowed by his collaborators on this film, Louis Malle and Jean-Paul Rappeneau (Malle produced the film as a criticism of Jean-Luc Godard and other then-right wing nouvelle vague directors and their support for the French occupation of Algeria and for the OAS and their campaign of terrorism and assassination in mainland France). It's an okay romantic triangle of sorts, with Romy Schneider transferring her affections from Jean-Louis Trintignant's spoiled right wing terrorist to Henri Serre's left-wing printer, leading to a rather silly duel. It's dated better than most Nouvelle Vague films of its day, but still has the mixture of shallow content and unconvincing storytelling that is less import than the style of filmmaking.