Alistair MacLean’s Arctic Dream

There are films that critics unanimously consecrate, and others that, despite critical derision, retain a strange and enduring grip upon memory. Such ambivalently received films are cherished with an almost irrational devotion by those who encounter them at the right age and the right mood. The Cold War yarn ‘Ice Station Zebra’ (1968), from the nerve-wracking novel by thriller maestro Alistair MacLean, belongs firmly to the latter category.

I watched it during adolescence when my MacLean mania was at its apogee, when many pleasurable hours spent devouring his novels and catching their film adaptations during cold weekday nights in a quieter, greener Pune that now feels almost as remote as the Arctic wastes of ‘Ice Station Zebra’ itself.

The film was one of two MacLean adaptations that regularly appeared on TNT - the other being ‘Where Eagles Dare’ (1968). Today, ‘Zebra’ is recalled (if at all) through the curious urban legend that it was billionaire magnate Howard Hughes’s favourite film, who reportedly watched obsessively during the final years of his reclusive existence.

‘Zebra’ is a tale of spies, saboteurs and vanished technology drifting somewhere beneath the Arctic night. At its centre lies a capsule containing highly classified photographic film recovered from a crashed reconnaissance satellite. The premise drew directly upon real anxieties surrounding America’s early CORONA spy satellite programme. In April 1959, a film capsule from the experimental Discoverer 2 mission drifted off course near Spitsbergen in the Arctic, provoking fears that the Soviets might recover it first.

There was once an entire cinematic ecosystem built around MacLean adaptations. His ‘adventure stories’ were full of beautiful descriptions of man pushing against nature’s extremes and leavened with wry, self-deprecating humour were massive bestsellers in his day. A typical Maclean hero was an exhausted professional navigating impossible situations with stoic precision.

His novels possessed an almost mathematical sense of suspense. In his most intense works like ‘Night Without End,’ ‘The Last Frontier’ (both 1959), ‘Fear Is the Key’ (1961), and the unputdownable ‘The Satan Bug’ (1962), the Scotsman repeatedly performed the delicious trick of keeping tension at screaming point, where temporary relief opens the door to more dangers and betrayals.

This pattern was followed in the novel ‘Ice Station Zebra’ (1963), where the rescue mission is merely the start of a deeper peril. Once the survivors boarded the USS Dolphin, the submarine became a floating chamber of deception and sabotage.

However, in the film version of ‘Zebra,’ director John Sturges jettisoned Maclean’s claustrophobic thrills (to the chagrin of many) and opted for a dramatic Cold War showdown between Russians and Americans upon the Arctic icecap itself.

Sturges was of the great American action filmmakers who languishes in semi-obscurity today. His best films - ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ (1955), ‘The Magnificent Seven’ (1960) and ‘The Great Escape’ (1963), and even the undervalued ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ (1976) - reveal the solidity of his craftsmanship: clean visual storytelling, spatial intelligence and an instinctive understanding of tension.

Having helmed the film version of Maclean’s ‘The Satan Bug,’ Sturges clearly was the right man for ‘Zebra.’ While Rock Hudson is solidly effective as the nuclear submarine commander, the film is effortlessly stolen by Patrick McGoohan as the cryptic and devious British intelligence operative David Jones. In fact, McGoohan annexes the entire film by sheer force of his edgy personality.

McGoohan had already established himself as one of television’s defining presences through the secret agent drama ‘Danger Man’ and would soon create ‘The Prisoner,’ perhaps the most intellectually ambitious espionage series ever made. He brings that same dangerous intelligence to his role in ‘Ice Station Zebra.’

Nursing whisky-laden coffee with barely concealed contempt for everyone around him, he snarls magnificently: “I know how to wreck submarines, and I know how to lie, steal, kidnap, counterfeit, suborn and kill. That’s my job. I do it with great pride.” Elsewhere comes the gloriously cynical observation: “The Russians put our camera made by our German scientists and your film made by your German scientists into their satellite made by their German scientists.”

Ernest Borgnine plays the apparently genial Russian defector Vaslov, capable of shifting from warmth to menace within seconds, perfectly suited to MacLean’s world of compromised loyalties. Though overshadowed by ‘The Guns of Navarone’ and ‘Where Eagles Dare,’

‘Ice Station Zebra,’ blessed by a lilting Michel Legrand score, endures splendidly because it retains the narcotic assurance of cinema made by craftsmen who relied on the slow accumulation of suspense, intelligent dialogue and the tensile anxiety between characters rather than violent action, gore, profanity and sensory overload that dominate so many contemporary thrillers.