Six Days Seven Nights
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Six Days Seven Nights (1998) is a romantic comedy interspersed with elements of the adventure film. The screenplay was written by Michael Browning. The movie, filmed on location in Kauai, was directed by Ivan Reitman. It starred Harrison Ford, Anne Heche, David Schwimmer, and Jacqueline Obradors.
Robin Monroe (Heche), a New York journalist working for Dazzle, a fashion magazine, is invited by her boyfriend Frank (Schwimmer) to spend a one-week holiday with him on the island paradise of Macatea in the South Pacific. For the final leg of their journey the couple have to make do with a small dilapidated aircraft piloted by an unfriendly middle-aged American called Quinn Harris (Ford). A few hours after their arrival, Frank proposes to Robin.
But Robin is a workaholic who cannot say no when she gets a call from her boss asking her to drop over to Tahiti just for one night to supervise some fashion event. She hires Harris to fly her there, but an unexpected thunderstorm forces Harris to make an emergency landing on a desert island. (One of the cinematographic highlights of the movie is the cross cutting sequence in which the forced landing is juxtaposed with a native dance performed for tourists and watched by Frank back at the hotel.)
Heche in Six Days Seven Nights
It does not take Harris and Robin too long to acknowledge the truthfulness of the old saying that opposites attract each other. Fighting for survival on the island, they fall in love with each other but do not get a break as they inadvertently become witnesses to modern-day pirates killing some of their rivals and throwing their bodies into the sea. After a narrow escape, Harris and Robin eventually succeed in starting their aeroplane again and flying back to Macatea.
Meanwhile, Angelica (Obradors), a friend of Harris's, has seduced Frank. Unable to hide his guilty conscience, Frank agrees when Robin breaks off their engagement in order to start a new life with Quinn Harris.
Critics have pointed out certain parallels between Ford and Heche as a bickering couple and Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen.
Heche announced that she was a lesbian shortly after being cast: a decision named by the magazine Total Film as the 10th "dumbest decision in movie history", given the mainly heterosexual target audience for the romantic comedy.