Bear Island [1979]

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The film went a million dollars over budget, which Sharp says was the first time it had happened in his career. In 2020 HarperCollins Publishers decided to reprint MacLean with fine new covers and a uniform look. Most notably, the view of the captain Lansing's cabin presents the captain's corpse being handcuffed to bulkhead and another corpse sitting by the desk. A curious thing to say about a film that threw in an avalanche or a U-boat stuffed with Nazi corpses, but it was very ho-hum.

Marlowe's efforts to unravel the plot become even more complicated once the movie crew is deposited ashore on Bear Island, beyond the reach of the law or outside help. Boom in Canadian Film Making Hits Snag: Explosion in Canadian Movies Stuck With the Movie 'A Necessary Shakeup' Begging for Distribution Shortage of Producers' ".Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news, events, offers and partner promotions. 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.

Snell, however, did get The Hostage Tower (1980) and Detonator II: Night Watch (1995) made for television. 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. Radio masts collapse, explosives are used to create deadly avalanches, a generator blows up, but who is the saboteur who seeks the elusive gold? I remember when I was 14 or so going with school friends to see a double bill of Puppet on a Chain and When Eight Bells Toll - it wasn't my choice and I remember them as tedious, but back then I would go to see any old rubbish. The murders continue ashore, and Marlowe, who is not what he seems to be either, discovers they may be related to some forgotten events of the Second World War.In 1976 Maclean's second wife Mary formed a company with producer Peter Snell, Aleelle Productions, who aimed to make movies based on MacLean novels including Golden Gate, Bear Island, The Way to Dusty Death and Captain Cook. Bear Island is a 1979 British Canadian adventure movie directed by Don Sharp and based on the 1971 novel of the same name by Alastair MacLean. Alistair Stuart MacLean (1922-1987) was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and spent his growing years nearby in Daviot, ten miles south of Inverness. They transform the challenging nature of Bear Island into their own playground, finding ice-cold waves and precipitous slopes.

Donald Sutherland attempts a flawed hero, but he doesn’t have much to work with, which includes a particularly vapid Redgrave. Espionagethriller from 1979 that takes place on a norwegian island near Spitzbergen but was filmed mainly in Canada and Alaska. Christopher Lee, Richard Widmark and Vanessa Redgrave give their European accents a whirl (which, in Widmark’s case, is oddly transfixing).If this was sounding just a little contrived, then that’s pretty much how it played out, with a big serving of convoluted into the bargain, and that proved costly to this British-Canadian production for which a lot had been riding on, not least a whole series of films based on the same author’s works. 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.