Bear Island [1979]

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Die besten Momente entstehen freilich wenn nächtens ENDLICH der Stromgenerator EXPLODIERT, der gewaltige Funkturm umstürzt und das (Schnee-) Chaos ausbricht. That’s due in large part to the action sequences put together by second unit director and stunt co-ordinator, Vic Armstrong. 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. Bear Island sags in the mid-section, but pulls itself together for a fairly dramatic race and chase finale from Vic Armstrong that pays off in a final unmasking of the no-gooder. Motivated by the classic surfer's relentless quest for the perfect wave, they travel to the remote Norwegian island of Bjornoya (Bear Island).

Vanessa Redgrave is a nice Norwegian doctor but the agent who was killed was Norwegian so there is a mystery there. 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. 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.

Bear Island, on loosely based on the great pulp authors work, is a tremendous mix of an action disaster film and a murder mystery. G. Wells Kurt Vonnegut Lee Child Loren Eiseley Louise Erdrich Louise Penny Lovecraft and Howard Malcolm X Margaret Atwood Marianne Moore and Her World Mo Willems Neil Gaiman Norman Mailer Octavia Butler Pat LaMarche and the Charles Bruce Foundation P. 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).

During pre production, Snell announced he had the film rights to six other MacLean novels, three of them not written. Despite being directed by a guy named Sharp, this Cold War thriller is really quite dull (Nobel prize for wordplay). Despite a better cast than most Alistair MacLean adaptations and an interesting Arctic story about Cold War struggles to dominate the globe by weather control, this fast becomes a dodo with such elements as a former U-Boat base, most of the cast's suspiciously Nazi pasts, and an array of Teutonic accents clearly destined to play a large part in the story.

The three brothers are more skilled at extreme sports than you'd expect, and their confident cold weather performance is impressive. Filmed in British Columbia and Alaska, the location shoot is beautiful and I’d love to see more winter shoots in locations like this. The filmography is also great for a self-shot action movie under such conditions (if only the "found footage" genre films could be this smooth). Lansing and Rubin disobey instructions and venture into the area near the U-boat base but someone triggers an avalanche using explosive charges, killing Rubin.