Bear Island

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.