Bear Island [1979]

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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. His next novel of The Guns of Navarone (1957), still considered one of the giants in the very large and good field of thrillers based retrospectively in World War II. 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.

Read all Three brothers go to remote Bear Island (Bjørnøya) in the Barents Sea to find the perfect wave; travelling with a surfboard, a snowboard, a paraglider and food found in supermarket trash canisters back home in Norway. Radio masts collapse, explosives are used to create deadly avalanches, a generator blows up, but who is the saboteur who seeks the elusive gold? the protagonist, is wholly non-believable, whether conversing with others or fist-fighting the bad guys. Avalanches, explosions, falling radio towers and plenty of carnage lie in wait for Donald and Lloyd as they attempt to discover the whereabouts of the gold and just who is behind the insanity of it all. I don't think you can make films about film units," he later said adding "I think possibly we tried to put too much meaning and too much cast into an action adventure story.The classic tale of adventure and death on a mysterious Arctic island, from the acclaimed master of action and suspense. This is especially the case with Sutherland who sounds as though he has been dubbed, all emotion being taken out of his voice: the result is very strange: the character is deeply involved in solving the mystery, but the actor sounds as though he doesn't care. Like most any mystery, guilt will be cast across each character as the tale unfolds letting the viewers play along. An international scientific expedition from the UN heads to the barren Arctic Bear Island to study climate change.

Gerran forbids access to the old U-boat base, but it becomes apparent that Lansing is very interested in it - his father was a U-boat commander who died there.MacLean can certainly capture claustrophobia and a paranoia in his writing but often that – and the pace of his stories – fails to translate. However, due to this movie's disappointing box-office performance, "Goodbye, California", and the other titles were never made by producer Peter Snell, who had bought the rights to numerous MacLean works in 1975, including ones at the time that had not even been published or written yet. This strikes me as one of those films that I rarely seem to find anything positive written about and to be honest, I can’t figure out why. The only person who has watched Ice Station Zebra more than me is Howard Hughes and I'd run him close.

Bear Island is a 1979 adventure movie directed by Don Sharp and based on the novel by Alistair MacLean ( Puppet on a Chain). I hadn’t seen this film since it came out at the theater and maybe a network debut the following year and upon this revisit, time hasn’t marred my judgement. If nothing else you get bang for your buck; avalanches, explosions, and all kinds of vehicular action; Swedish Larven “Caterpillar” snow scooters and amphibious aircraft-propelled catamarans, also known as hydrocopters. Left stranded, the cast must have drawn straws for lines like 'This is no place for scientists who can't control themselves'. 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.

Donald Sutherland, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee and Lloyd Bridges star in this 1979 British-Canadian thriller based on Alistair MacLean's novel, Bear Island. 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.