Ice House

My review was written in June 1989 after a Greenwich Village screening.

Play-to-film adaptation "Ice House" boasts impressive performances by husband and wife team of Bo Brinkman and Melissa Gilbert, but is too claustrophobic a piece to attract much interest.

Ironically, film works best when bearing down on the two principals in close up monologs or angry bickering. Texan helmer Eagle Pennell unwisely injects illustrated flashbacks (shot in Texas) which are banal and silly and fail miserably at opening out Brinkman's play, which Brinkman adapted for the screen and produced as well.

He toplines as Pake, a ne'er-do-well from Texas, who's escaped the oil fields to become a bum rather than the recording star he dreamed to be. Pic concerns a long night in an L. A. hotel room (actually lensed at Gotham's Chelsea Hotel) during which Pake cajoles his former girlfriend from back home, Kay (Gilbert), to go off with him to Texas to get married and start a new life. Odd man out is Andreas Manolikakis as Kay's current pal, anxious to marry her to get his U. S. citizenship.

Pic's highpoint is Brinkman's lengthy monoglo, filmed in continuous take, recalling a symbolic nightmare he had. Gilbert, child star on tv's "Little House on the Prairie", excels in an adult role played mainly hard as nails. Manolikakis is saddled with a stereotyped assignment, all gestures and outbursts.

Tech credits are modest, with purposefully unflattering photography of the leads.