Ice Station Zebra

Hi Aki,

Sunday night, 9.20, I’ll go offline after this.

Tonight (and last night) we watched Ice Station Zebra a 1968 adaptation of the Alistair Mclean spy novel. After The Guns of Navarone was such a huge, huge hit, Mclean’s tales were in big demand in Hollywood. MGM, which was a floundering, dying studio in the 60s, put a lot of money into Zebra in hopes of hitting a jackpot too.

Unfortunately, the stars here are Rock Hudson, Patrick McGoohan, and Ernest Borgnine (with Jim Brown in a much-smaller role) and they don’t match Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn who starred in Navarone. Moreover Navarone was a WW2 epic, and had some cute girls in the cast, and Nazis, and a lot more drama in the twists and counter-twists.

Both films are directed by what you’d call journeyman directors: J Lee Thompson did Navarone, and John Sturgess gets the call here in Zebra. But I think that both these pictures are more studio pictures than director’s pictures.

Here in Zebra MGM really spent big. They shot in super Panavison, I guess that’s a 70mm format, and did a big road show edition, which is what they put on the DVD – with music before, an intermission, an entr’acte, and a Cinerama release. So all the technical credits of the movie are top grade, special effects, model work, big sets, and so on.

The story: a satellite comes down over the ice in the Arctic. Next thing you know, submarine commander Rock Hudson is ordered to take his ship up to Ice Station Zebra, a scientific camp on the ice. He is also ordered to take ‘Mr Jones’ a British spy, along. What ‘Mr Jones’ is supposed to do, Hudson is not allowed to know, and ‘Jones’ is not talking. They also take a troop of Marines, and along the way pick up two more mysterious passengers, a Marine captain, and Vaslov, a Russian defector and longtime pal of ‘Jones.’

Along the way somebody tries to sabotage the sub, so they know one of them is a traitor. Who could it be? Not Hudson, so is it the Marine captain? The Russian defector? Or is the smug, snide, bastard British spy a traitor? Hudson must find out! (Actually in the book, as I recall, the tale is told in the first person ‘I’ by ‘Jones’ but the movie takes a more objective approach, so as to increase the number of suspects; actually I think the bigger reason is that ‘Jones’ is played by McGoohan, who was only a British TV star, and Hudson was an American Hollywood star!)

They reach Ice Station Zebra and find it’s a ruin. Some of the men are dead, shot and then burned to cover it up; the others are suffering from trauma, exposure, frostbite, and can only mutter incoherently.

Finally, and this comes about 100 minutes into the movie, ‘Jones’ explains what it’s all about to the commander: the satellite is a Russian satellite, which carried a super-camera developed by the British and using a super-film developed by the Americans. The satellite has taken pictures of all the missile pads in America, but when the Russians fired the rockets to bring the satellite down, it went out of control, went over Russia, and took pictures of all their missile pads (yes, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever; the film from the satellite is what Hitchcock called the ‘MacGuffin,’ the thing that everybody is after but it’s only an excuse. The Maltese Falcon is another famous MacGuffin.)

They search for the film, and finally ‘Jones’ finds a transmitter that will indicate the film’s location. But as he concentrates on the transmitter, he’s slugged – it’s the Russian defector, who’s not a defector after all, but a double-double agent! The Marine captain now enters, gets the drop on the Russian, and they struggle. ‘Jones’ comes to, and seeing the Marine trying to kill his buddy the Russian, he concludes that the Marine was the traitor, just as ‘Jones’ suspected, so he kills the Marine. Then the medics come in before the Russian can finish off the job.

The weather has cleared and now the Russian jets arrive, dropping paratroopers to come get the film. The sub commander has a detonator to the booby-trapped capsule with the film, but the Russian defector says he can open the capsule and get the film without setting off the bomb. He does so. But in the meantime the Russian paratroopers have them surrounded. Everybody starts shooting; the Russian double-agent makes a break for the paratroopers, but ‘Jones’ has now figured out his mistake and fights with the double-agent. The double-agent gets shot in the crossfire, and when the smoke clears, it’s just another standoff. Everybody will die unless they agree to hand over the film. ‘Jones’ still doesn’t want to do it, but the sub commander orders him to.

The Russian paratroopers put the film back in the capsule and send it up on a weather balloon so a jet can retrieve it (this makes no sense either). But sub commander Hudson gets to save the day by setting off his detonator; the capsule blows up in midair, destroying the film, so neither side gets it.

The Russians withdraw, the Americans go back to the sub. As the sub sails over open waters, we see the public version of events: the survivors of Ice Station Zebra have been rescued by an American submarine with help from the Russian air force paratroopers in an example of cooperation between the nuclear powers…

Everything is good about this movie but the script. Harry and Julian Fink were given adaptation credits – they also would go on to write Dirty Harry and I’ll bet a bunch of other big Hollywood pictures of the period. And they generally follow the book as far as I can remember it, except for shading our sympathies to Rock Hudson’s character as much as they can. But the source material is a problem, as there are no cute girls or romance to appeal to women; the basic story has its implausibilities, and by not telling the story strictly from the spy’s point of view, they lose that sense of involvement and engagement that Mclean developed. Mclean’s books are filled with twist upon twist, manly action, brainy puzzles and stratagems, some of them quite clever, and some things that are just goofy – and so they’ll only work if the storyteller manages to hold us in his spell so we don’t even notice how ridiculous the story is.

I’m sure MGM lost a lot of money on this one. I think they also lost money on another huge movie they made this year, 2001: A Space Odyssey but I expect that 2001 made money over the long haul. Not Zebra!

I find in general mysteries are much better in books, especially told in first person, than they are in film. It’s practically a crime not to let the audience know what is going on for almost 100 minutes. There’s nobody really to root for. Even Hudson is sort of clueless.

The only sequence that really works comes about half way through: the sub is sabotaged when the torpedo tube opens, and water floods some compartments. This drags the sub down, down, down – deeper than it really can go. The nuclear reactors are pushed to the limit to bring the sub up, but they aren’t working. They try desperately to close the torpedo hatch, and the water fills the chambers, and the sub goes down and down! Finally the hatch is closed and they level off, a hundred meters deeper than the sub is supposed to be able to handle. This sequence runs about 12 to 15 minutes and is terrific, good suspense.

The ending is really flat. Nobody wins, and the best that comes of the mission is rescuing the scientists at the camp. But we never even get to know their names, and we don’t care about them, and we never did; we don’t get to see them recovering, we don’t even get to see sub commander or ‘Jones’ on board relaxing after a mission together. Just an aerial shot of the sub…

(29 March 2009)