 | |
List Price: $14.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 2634
Released: January 11, 2005 |
| Our Price: $5.60 |
| Used Price: $4.75 |
|
MPAA Rating: G (General Audience)
Media: DVD |
|
Editorial Review:
John Sturges's adaptation of Alistair MacLean's novel stars Rock Hudson as submarine commander James Ferraday. When a weather-monitoring station near the North Pole is nearly destroyed by fire, he's ostensibly sent to find out what went wrong. But since he's been ordered to bring along Capt. Leslie Anders (Jim Brown) and a platoon of Marines, British agent David Jones (Patrick McGoohan), and Russian defector Boris Vaslov (Ernest Borgnine), he realizes he's being kept in the dark about the true nature of the mission. Eventually it becomes clear that the USS Tigerfish is in a race with a Russian sub to recover reconaissance film crucial to national defense that was being carried aboard a spacecraft that crashed near the polar ice cap. When the sub is sabotaged--causing it to sink perilously close to a depth that would lead to an explosion--it becomes clear that a double agent is on board, but Ferraday doesn't have enough evidence to arrest anyone. Although the film is often remembered as the one chosen for ad nauseam viewing by Howard Hughes, it's a well-made combination of action and suspense, boasting a fine score by Michel Legrand.
Description of Ice Station Zebra:
Out of step with the public mood when it was released in 1968, Ice Station Zebra has held up decently as a Guy's Movie. Based on an Alistair MacLean novel, the film is half submarine picture and half spy puzzler, short on action but long on military chatter and espionage gamesmanship. Rock Hudson, looking seasoned and just a little miffed, gives one of his better performances as the captain of a nuclear sub, ordered to the Arctic to check out a disturbance at a research station on the floating ice. He doesn't know the mission, but he's stuck with mysterious passengers: haughty British agent Patrick McGoohan, back-slapping Russian operative Ernest Borgnine, and hostile Marine captain Jim Brown. McGoohan gets the film's best lines and finest fur jacket, but Brown is pretty cool in a smaller role.
John Sturges directs, with customary deliberateness; at times the movie seems to be suffering from iron-poor blood. Much of the dialogue is pretty sharp, especially in the submarine half, enough to keep you engrossed if you're in the mood for this kind of thing. When the action shifts to the ice, the studio-bound sets inevitably take their toll. It's not hard to see how this large, old-fashioned project misfired in the era of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, but the more tantalizing question is: Why did this movie become an obsessive favorite of Howard Hughes? Maybe he liked how clean it all looks. --Robert Horton
Ice Station Zebra Reviews:
Great movie! 
2009-08-17 - I usually like a book more than the movie. In this case the movie fully lived up to the book on which it is based. The cast is excellent, and the story moves well. I get some movies from Netflix, but this one is well worth buying.
5 stars until the last 5 minutes 
2009-07-04 - If you have read the book, then watch the movie until the 140th minute and stop. You will thank me for it.
Until then, the movie is a taut thriller, and Rock Hudson really towers and carries the movie thru.
ice station zebra
2009-06-09 - Excellent picture, like this are not made any longer ! I do reccommend also Where Eagles Dare
Alfredo
Another All-time Favorite.
2009-06-06 - About the only thing I had in common with Howard Hughes is that we both loved this movie. Hughes allegedly watched it 17 times one weekend. I saw it at its original reserved-seat run at the Cinerama theater on Broadway in New York and have watched it numerous times since then (although not as much as Hughes.)
The name Alistair MacLean is not that well-remembered today. However he was the king of action novelists during the 1950s and '60s. Many of his books were made into films, the most famous being "The Guns of Navarone" and its sequel "Force 10 from Navarone," "Where Eagles Dare," "Breakheart Pass" and this film. This film was supposed to re-unite his Navarone stars, Gregory Pack and David Niven. However when shooting started, they were no longer available. Instead we got Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine and Patrick McGoohan. Hudson and Borgnine are fine but it is McGoohan who steals the film as a British secret agent named "Jones" who is very similar to his John Drake "Secret Agent" TV persona. There are no female members of the cast.
The first half of the film involves the U.S. submarine's voyage under the polar ice pack to get to Zebra. It includes a terrifically suspenseful scene of a saboteur's attempt to flood the submarine while under the pack. The second half involves the locating of Zebra culminating in the U.S./Russian confrontation at the detroyed station for the secret of Ice Station Zebra.
Directed by the great John Sturges, (The Great Escape, Magnificent 7, etc.) this is an exciting and suspenseful film. It features a great score by Michel Legrand and fine special effects of the submarine journeying under the polar ice pack (great on the big screen.)It lost the special effects Oscar to 2001. The DVD features the overture, intermission music and music for exiting the theater.
Unfortunately the DVD only includes some vintage short subjects from the time the film was made. It would have been very nice for a retrospective on this fine film. While Hudson and Sturges are long-gone, McGoohan was alive until recently and Borgnine, Jim Brown (who basically stands around looking angry the entire film,) and Tony Bill are still alive.
This is a classic cold-war suspense thriller that has stood the test of time, I would love to see its eventual release on Blu-ray.
Cold War in the proper setting. 
2009-05-21 - At the time this film was released, the spy satellite at the center of the story was considered a science fantasy. We know better now. Cold war thriller with all the implausible elements all too plausible in the present time.
