Contractual Obligations Are So Romantic

Are we back?

We seemed to get a slew of adventurous romcoms in the early 1980s, probably because a lot of people wanted to ride the Indiana Jones wave, and one of the most famous of that time was 1984’s Romancing the Stone, a fiery and funny send-up of romance novels. Those who have seen that movie will remember that (spoiler alert) it ends with the protagonists, Joan and Jack, setting off on a round-the-world cruise on Jack’s new sailboat.

In 1985, Romancing the Stone got a sequel, The Jewel of the Nile. One would think this came about because everyone on the first film had such a great time and it was so romantic and who wouldn’t want more of the same?

Heck, no. But we’ll get to that.

The film opens like its predecessor, with a scene from one of Joan’s romance novels, only instead of a Western it’s a swashbuckling affair that’s straight out of an Errol Flynn movie. It’s huge and dramatic, but it leaves us on a cliffhanger because it’s a work in progress.

In the real world, Jack (Michael Douglas) and Joan (Kathleen Turner) are in Cannes, with Joan on the deck of the sailboat working on her latest novel while Jack windsurfs around the boat. Joan is frustrated. She’s got writer’s block. She wants a little bit of stability and normalcy after six months of sailing. And her relationship with Jack doesn’t seem to be going anywhere serious.

At a book signing that night, Joan is approached by an Arab ruler named Omar (Spyros Fokas) who seems very romantic and mysterious. He invites Joan to come visit him at his home and write about him, which Joan readily accepts. Jack isn’t too happy about it even though he’s also invited, and glumly rides home later on his rented motorcycle, just in time to see Joan pull away with Omar, as well as see his sailboat explode.

Funnily enough, Jack runs into his old frenemy, Ralph (Danny DeVito), who’s been in prison since the last movie, and they meet up with a resistance fighter named Tarak (Paul David Magid), who tells them that Omar is a dangerous dictator, Joan is in danger, and that Jack must help get the Jewel of the Nile back from Omar. It takes some doing, but Ralph and Tarak convince Jack to team up with them and go after both Joan and the Jewel.

Nothing goes according to plan, of course. Jack finds Joan and the Jewel, the latter of which isn’t a literal jewel but a kindly spiritual leader named Al-Julhara (Avner Eisenberg), while Ralph gets swept up with Tarak’s band of Sufis and is off with them most of the time, where he gets to walk across hot coals by way of initiation.

Omar, who is the creep he’s been described as, holds a big to-do that Roger Ebert once called “a cross between a rock concert and the Nuremberg Rally,” and that’s where everything comes to a head. Before that, however, new sparks fly for Joan and Jack, who realize how much they hate being apart.

The Jewel of the Nile is a lot of fun, although it’s definitely not as good as Romancing the Stone. It also makes much more sense after seeing the first movie. It’s not a must, though–I saw Jewel before I saw Romancing the Stone and still got it. It was impossible not to, because Michael Douglas really laid on the charm, and it wasn’t hard to fill in the narrative blanks.

It’s also fun to see the Sufis, who meet Tarak at the airport with a boom box in tow. So much about this movie is really dated, but that’s just part of its charm. Well, mostly–besides Omar’s more than obvious Nazi connections there’s one scene in which Ralph refers to one of the Sufis as a “towel head.”

One of the movie’s other saving graces is Avner Eisenberg, who’s funny and goofy, referring to Joan as “Just Joan”, and legend has it Sean Connery modeled his Dr. Jones after Eisenberg’s performance. Eisenberg’s last film credit was in 1992, but it’s safe to say he made his mark as the Jewel.

The chemistry between Douglas and Turner is famously combative, and it wasn’t all for the movie. Turner had no interest in making a sequel to Romancing the Stone and only agreed to The Jewel of the Nile out of contractual obligations. Even then, she threatened to bolt in the midst of filming, and in turn Douglas threatened to sue her. The film got done, of course, much to everyone’s relief, and that was that.

It’s no surprise that reviews for Jewel were mixed. The New York Times, while praising Kathleen Turner’s performance, was particularly negative, saying, “”The Jewel of the Nile”…contains a lot of undue fanfare…Far from generating excitement, this excess baggage merely signals conspicuous waste. It’s never possible to enjoy the film without registering how much costly, unnecessary trouble went into getting it made.”

Roger Ebert agreed, although he was more positive: “For all of those pleasures, “The Jewel of the Nile” is a slight and lightweight entertainment. How could it be otherwise? And it is not quite the equal of “Romancing the Stone.” That’s not a surprise. For what it is, though, it’s fun. And for what it’s worth, Douglas and Turner could keep on working in this tradition forever, giving us a 1980s version of the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope “Road” pictures. I guess they don’t want to, though, and perhaps that’s just as well.”

Jewel wasn’t the last time Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner would share a screen, as Danny DeVito got the gang back together for The War of the Roses, another movie about a combative couple seemingly on the outs. Turner also had a recurring role on Douglas’s show, The Kominsky Method, playing Douglas’s character, Sandy’s ex-wife Roz in six episodes. Naturally, the show referenced Turner and Douglas’s earlier work together as Jack and Joan, showing how loved these characters are even forty years after Stone and Jewel.

For more 1985, please see Quiggy at The Midnite Drive-in and Rachel at Hamlette’s Soliloquy. Thanks for hosting this, y’all–it was a great idea! Thanks for reading, all, and see you on Tuesday for an unusual Judy Garland post…

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