Bear Island

Dir: Don Sharp

1979

****

Bear Island is a great little action thriller that seems to have been unfairly overlooked and long forgotten. A shame really as this is the quintessential Saturday afternoon movie. It's got espionage, it's got mystery, a 'Who done it' ending, secret Nazi bases, snowmobile chases, the lot! With Donald Sutherland, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee (who had recently been fired by actor Richard Harris on the earlier Alistair MacLean movie Golden Rendezvous (1977) and Lloyd Bridges, it boasts an impressive cast. Loosely based on the novel Bear Island by Alistair MacLean, it was directed by the great Don Sharp. It begins with a UN expedition of scientists from different countries arriving at the barren arctic Bear Island, between Svalbard and northern Norway, to study climate change. However, several of them turn out to be more interested in the fact that (according to the film) there was a German U-boat base on the island during the Second World War. American scientist Frank Lansing (Donald Sutherland) has come because his father was a U-boat commander who died there, and as accidents start to decimate the expedition he begins to realise that some of his colleagues are after a shipment of gold aboard the U-boat that his father commanded. The German heritage story involving Donald Sutherland's character is actually really clever, not to mention intense and disturbing. The original novel was published in 1971 and became a best-seller, selling over eight million copies. "It will make a whopping good movie," wrote the Los Angeles Times at the time and they weren’t wrong. Film rights were purchased by Canadian-born Peter Snell who had lived in England since 1961. Snell set up the film in Canada, which was experiencing a film boom due to the assistance of tax concessions in 1976 allowing the write-off of losses on films that qualify as sufficiently Canadian. Snell wanted to make a film that targeted the international market; there would be no Canadian characters and the film was not set in Canada. However Snell and several of the actors and most of the crew were Canadian. "Three in every eight households have a MacLean novel," said Snell. "He's certainly sold better than Ian Fleming. The James Bond pictures are fast running out of gimmicks. Action-adventure will always work better in the long run if you stay away from gimmicks." It’s a comment I can’t help but agree with and while watching I thought of it as a pleasant alternative to a Bond film and a lot better than a number of them. The film would be the most expensive made in Canada until that time, costing over $9 million. Snell had the film rights to six other MacLean novels, three of them not written. Snell and Selkirk were so positive about Bear Island's prospects that at one stage they planned a series of Alistair MacLean adaptations for annual Christmas release, starting with The Way to Dusty Death. Don Sharp was hired to write and direct and the idea was developed further. Indeed, the announcement at the very end of the closing credits reads "Coming Soon -Alistair MacLean's Goodbye California". Bear Island was intended as the first in a series of Alistair MacLean adaptations which would have included "El Dorado", "Athabasca", "Night Without End", and "The Way to Dusty Death". The very next intended film in the series, "Goodbye, California", was to be shot with a budget of around $12-13 million. However, due to Bear Island’s disappointing box office performance, "Goodbye, California", and the other titles were never made. Snell, who had bought the rights to a number of MacLean works in 1975 including ones at the time that had not even been published or written yet, took a financial hit. However did get The Hostage Tower (1980) and Detonator II: Night Watch (1995) made for television. The film wasn’t just a financial disaster either, as a crew member, a helicopter pilot, was killed during a landing while director Don Sharp and a four of members of the crew during production got trapped and stranded on a glacier for three days in a sudden blizzard whiteout during a location scouting recce and nearly perished. A sad ending for what is a great adaptation.