Ice Station Zebra
        
Director: John Sturges
Year: 1968
Rating: 6.0
While watching this I was thinking that in 20-years some father will be sitting with his young son or daughter and the child will ask their father, why is there so much white stuff? And the father will answer, there used to be a place at the top of the world that we called the Artic. It is gone now just like Florida. Florida? What is that dad? A place where teaching about Climate Change was illegal.


 
But back in 1968 the Artic was going strong. This is based on the novel by Alistair MacLean whose books were very popular at the time and two of them had been turned into films - The Guns of Navarone and The Satan Bug - and in this same year Where Eagles Dare. This is a submarine Cold War film of intrigue and spies. The spying part I enjoyed but submarine movies bore me to death. It is a big production directed by John Sturges who already had The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape under his belt. Shot in Cinemascope with the music of Michel Legrand swelling throughout. But it bombed at the box office which surprises me because this is such a well-known film now and it isn't bad by any means. Maybe the actors didn't bring them in. Initially, they had Gregory Peck, David Niven and George Segal slated but they ended up with Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown and The Prisoner himself, Patrick McGoohan. It is also 2.5 hours long. A lot of time to spend submerged.

 

Hudson as the Commander of the submarine is ordered to go to the North Pole and save men in a weather station who have been sending signals that they need help. They also load him with McGoohan who is British Spy on a different mission of sorts. Along with him is his fellow spy, a Russian who switched sides years ago, Borgnine. And Brown is in charge of a platoon of Marines. A platoon of Marines? Why would they need them? Ah, because something fell out of a space capsule that both sides want. Someone is of course a traitor - I think MacLean liked throwing that in there - and almost sinks the sub - and then they finally break through the ice at about the 70-minut mark and look for this item. And the Russians are coming. The first half - pre-Intermission nearly put me to sleep - lots of shots of the subs rising and submerging and sub techo babble - but once on land it gets pretty good.