Ice Station Zebra

An emergency call comes from a British weather station in the Arctic and then the signal stops. An American nuclear submarine sets out to reach it. There are extra passengers aboard: a British intelligence officer, a Russian émigré and a detachment of marines. Nobody tells anybody what the mission actually is. As they move under the ice, the boat is sabotaged. John Sturges directs. Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan and Jim Brown are in the cast. The source is Alistair MacLean's novel. The mission is in fact to recover a film capsule dropped by a satellite; behind the story is the satellite espionage of the Cold War. It was presented in Cinerama and was among the most expensive productions of its day; the submarine interiors and the ice were built in the studio. What is interesting is that the tension is built in an enclosed space rather than physically. Almost nothing happens in the first hour; the narrative advances on who knows what. Howard Hughes is known to have watched it obsessively many times over, which added to the film's later reputation. It runs over two and a half hours. Who it is for: viewers who like Cold War espionage and large scale sixties production. Who it is not for: it is very long, the first half is slow, and the studio manufacture of the snow is obvious now.