Bear Island [1979]

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Bear Island sags in the mid-section, but pulls itself together for a fairly dramatic race and chase finale from Vic Armstrong that pays off in a final unmasking of the no-gooder. During the movie their pistols passes to another hands including Frank Lansing ( Donald Sutherland) and Paul Hartman ( Lawrence Dane). If this was sounding just a little contrived, then that’s pretty much how it played out, with a big serving of convoluted into the bargain, and that proved costly to this British-Canadian production for which a lot had been riding on, not least a whole series of films based on the same author’s works. Despite being directed by a guy named Sharp, this Cold War thriller is really quite dull (Nobel prize for wordplay).

I did think at that point that there was a chance that could end up being the best scene in the film because I don't know how any film could follow a moment like that, it was fabulous. Like most any mystery, guilt will be cast across each character as the tale unfolds letting the viewers play along. Certainly the producers had amassed as starry a cast as they could, with Sutherland the most famous Canadian actor around so a shoo-in for the lead ( William Shatner presumably unavailable), though he was playing an American, and Vanessa Redgrave as the team doctor and love interest for him was a Brit playing Norwegian, complete with a singularly odd accent. However, in the censored version only a glimpse of the captain Lansing's corpse is shown, the SS-man is totally cut out.Lansing and Smithy decide to go to the NATO base for help, and although their snowmobile is sabotaged they both survive the explosion. I was drawn to this because of the fantastic cast so it made an instant poor impression because so many of them were sporting silly accents and I'm not sure it ever really recovered.

The classic tale of adventure and death on a mysterious Arctic island, from the acclaimed master of action and suspense. They may not reprint the later novels, which were written with collaborators working from outlines and notes from MacLean, but the great years of the beginning and middle of his career are well-represented. Despite a better cast than most Alistair MacLean adaptations and an interesting Arctic story about Cold War struggles to dominate the globe by weather control, this fast becomes a dodo with such elements as a former U-Boat base, most of the cast's suspiciously Nazi pasts, and an array of Teutonic accents clearly destined to play a large part in the story.Snowcapped and soporific, this adaptation of Alistair Maclean's novel Bear Island is a product from a time when transferring the author's work to the big screen was still a regular occurence even though the output no longer had the pull that they once did. it's routine adventure- flick stuff: blood, guts and (a little) suspense intercut with acting of appalling quality, and dialogue that makes one yearn for the days of silent movies.