Bear Island

The UK-Canada co-production treaty of the late Seventies produced a lot of dross. "Bear Island" is better than some of its companions but still no classic.

Alistair MacLean's novel was a turgid affair, written at the start of his long decline as a writer. The film-makers wisely ditch most of his plot but the story they substitute, about an icy hunt for wartime Nazi gold, is no masterpiece of originality. Vanessa Redgrave's Norwegian accent comes and goes (at times, she sounds like the Swedish chef from "The Muppets") and Donald Sutherland tries for depth by speaking - very - very - slowly. Anybody who has seen a few of these films won't take long to guess the identity of the "mystery" villain.

On the credit side, the locations are spectacular and Robert Farnon's music score is appropriately portentous. Don Sharp knows how to direct action (he had been brought in a few years earlier to ginger up another MacLean adaptation, "Pupper On a Chain") and the fights are well-staged.

Comparing Alistair MacLean and Ian Fleming is salutary. Both were heavy-drinking Scots who wrote action thrillers, hitting the jackpot in the Fifties and Sixties. But whereas Fleming's novels have risen to be Penguin Modern Classics, MacLean-- once said to be the world's best-selling novelist-- is now totally out of print in the States, and in and out of it in his own country.

Fleming created a flat but fascinating protagonist who became more interesting than the villains and girls he encountered; MacLean never used the same character twice, preferring chase and setting to psychology. His inability to invent interesting female foils was absolute; often they have the same name, Mary or variants thereon. MacLean trusted that the story would be its own reward, but without psychological flesh on the bones his stock situation-- group of professionals in tight-lipped quest for a treasure, one of them a snake in the grass- becomes wearisome.

MacLean's other handicap was that he liked money. After "The Guns of Navarone" hit dollar paydirt, he increasingly wrote with movie adaptation in mind, producing hybrids that were neither literary nor cinematic; whereas Fleming barely lived to see the Bond films blossoming into history's biggest screen moneyspinner.

"Bear Island" is a case study in the frosty aridity of MacLean's "visual" imagination. The gang are placed in a locale he knows and loves: the Arctic, scene of his first hit, "HMS Ulysses", and "Ice Station Zebra", a good film. In the background is World War Two, in which MacLean's naval service was the making of him. The principals are uneasily allied in search of Nazi gold buried on Bear Island, near Spitzbergen. There is much betraying and motive-revelation, chases in boats and on skis and snowmobiles, close-quarters work with fists, knives and guns, before the treasure hunt is played out. But it's all as chilly as the temperature.

To begin with, the film was an Anglo-Canadian co-production, never a promising sign; it was shot in British Columbia with a cast ill at ease with their roles. Donald Sutherland, the Canadian contribution, gawps and mumbles in his usual fashion, hardly the strong silent MacLean hero. Vanessa Redgrave-- incredibly, this was the part with which she chose to follow an Oscar for "Julia"-- is a statuesque Scandinavian with a wobbly Ingrid Bergmanesque accent. Christopher Lee seems to pine for cape and fangs. Lloyd Bridges, the bad apple, hams it up in a manner anticipating his turn to actual self-parody in "Airplane!".

All are often encased in anoraks and big fur hoods, so knowing who is doing what to whom is a puzzle. The pace is crippled by the conditions: fights seem slapstick, and there is a ludicrous moment when several characters flounderingly "break into a run" knee deep in snow, at a leaden pace. The icy scenery is attractive, but to get scale the camera has to stand well back, diminishing the figures of the actors and making their manoeuvres seem as trivial as a puppet show.

Director Don Sharp, as Ken Annakin noted in his memoirs, was better at derring-do than humour, but nobody goes to MacLean for a laugh: here too he is unlike Fleming, whose pawky vein of wit was broadened by the Bond scenarists and has preserved the early 007 entries magnificently. The solemnity of "Bear Island"'s furry, flailing personnel becomes risible.

The picture, in short, was a weary and chilly haul for the audience. Not that many were given the chance; it was hardly released to cinemas and became a TV schedule filler. It might as well have been a midatlantic melange from Lord Grade.

As usual with Alistair McLean, it's a great story, but this time they fooled around with it a little too much, overdoing it into almost a parody, drowning the thriller in deafening music and exaggerated technical effects, waltzing around with snow scooters in wild goose chases, and so on. Everything is good until the stormy night, when everything collapses and relapses into chronic confusion, and on top of it all the actors can't speak clearly. Donald Sutherland is clear enough and sticks to his role all the way, Vanessa Redgrave is fair enough also in her acting as always, Richard Widmark also excels in honesty as usual, and who already in 1979 grapples with the problem of climate change and global warming, Christopher Lee is the greatest actor here though, playing an honest Russian for a change, Lloyd Bridges is queer enough, but in the resulting confusion of the sabotages coming in tautologies, it's not quite clear who fired on whom and who caused all those fires and ruined the generator, the radio mast, mixed up the books and so on. Many seem to have messed with many things, and what about poor Larsen? Was his body ever found? Who killed him and why? What did he try to communicate? Sorry, there is too much confusion in this hullabaloo of intrigues and counter-intrigues.

Still it's worth seeing, if not for anything else then at least for the story and Donald's discovery of his father. Here is the real mystery and central plot of the story – the mysterious fate of the last German u-boat captain, and the scene revealing the u-boat is a thriller in itself you'll always remember.

I had heard that Bear Island was not a good movie at all, but I wanted to see it anyway because I like the cast a lot. When I eventually saw it, I didn't find it great, but it was much better than I expected.

Pros: Lovely photography and great sets and locations. Atmospheric score by Richard Farnon. Great performances from Richard Widmark and Christopher Lee, Vanessa Redgrave has her moments but has an inconsistent accent. Sharp and well paced direction.

Cons: As much as I love Donald Sutherland, he does look bored and stiff here. The dialogue is uneven, having moments when it is decent but some of it is really quite bad. The story has great idea and starts and ends well, but the film is rather sluggish with some of the middle section feeling like filler.

All in all, not great, not awful, just somewhere in between. 6/10 Bethany Cox

I wish the people who keep butchering excellent Alistair MacLean books would clear off and stop ruining this great author's works by transforming them into crummy movies. This is a truly dire version of one of his best books ever. It sticks to the plot in loose terms, but alters the characters beyond recognition and even substitues a gold hunting element to the plot to explain why they're all on this desolate island in the first place, when in the book there was a perfectly good explanation for it anyway. Donald Sutherland looks bored, Vanessa Redgrave looks miscast, Christopher Lee gets killed in the middle and looks glad to get out of it early, and Lloyd Bridges wears a smirk that suggests his agent told him it was a comedy. Even the other actors, such as the talented Barbara Parkins, seem unenthused by the whole project. What they needed to do here was to stick more rigidly to the story in the actual book and to get a cast who were actually interested in what they were doing. This is a travesty. Only River of Death beats it as the worst ever film version of a MacLean book.