Ice Castles (1978)

(On Cable TV, December 2021) Sometimes, there just isn’t much to say: Ice Castles is a movie about ice skating and… well… that’s that. It’s the story of a young girl who wants to be a figure skater, encounters adversity in the form of sudden blindness and eventually achieves her goals by the end of the film, but not before reuniting with the man in her life and staying true to her values. So brave, so heartfelt and yet so ordinary. The disability angle is clearly there to earn sympathy in a schematic manner, but the film makes it work. At least the lead actors aren’t bad — Lynn-Holly Johnson was a figure skater before turning to acting (most notably here and in a later James Bond film), while Robby Benson is not bad as the boyfriend. Under writer-director Donald Wrye, Ice Castles is executed competently by late-1970s standards, meaning that it will appeal to its target audience. Otherwise, what else is there to say?