This strikes me as one of those films that I rarely seem to find anything positive written about and to be honest, I can’t figure out why. Christopher Lee, Richard Widmark and Vanessa Redgrave give their European accents a whirl (which, in Widmark’s case, is oddly transfixing).

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.

it's routine adventure- flick stuff: blood, guts and (a little) suspense intercut with acting of appalling quality, and dialogue that makes one yearn for the days of silent movies. MacLean’s first novel garnered him a very large advance (headline news in postwar Britain), but it was a good bet. An international scientific expedition from the UN heads to the barren Arctic Bear Island to study climate change.

The Third Reich ended here…The Fourth Reich is just beginning…’ runs the tagline for Don Sharp’s 1979 Alistair MacLean adaptation, a big all-star action movie that was way out of fashion with critics and audiences back in the day. This movie 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". Later, Lansing finds an underwater entrance to the U-boat base, where he finds his father's submarine with his remains still inside it. Espionagethriller from 1979 that takes place on a norwegian island near Spitzbergen but was filmed mainly in Canada and Alaska. Also on the island is a bombed out U-Boat facility and supposedly underground passages and caverns where ships may still exist and as we will learn, the possibility of a fortune in gold bars.Sehenswert sind jedoch die beeindruckenden Landschaftsaufnahmen, die in Alaska und Kanada gedreht wurden und für die Alan Hume verantwortlich war, der sich damit für die nächsten drei Bond-Filme als Kameramann qualifizierte. Turns out there is a shit tonne of Nazi gold on the island and somebody is willing to kill to get to it. During the movie their pistols passes to another hands including Frank Lansing ( Donald Sutherland) and Paul Hartman ( Lawrence Dane). This is especially the case with Sutherland who sounds as though he has been dubbed, all emotion being taken out of his voice: the result is very strange: the character is deeply involved in solving the mystery, but the actor sounds as though he doesn't care.

If the reader notices a working world of a particular time and place and mores, the novels have that, too. It was directed by Don Sharp and starred Donald Sutherland, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee and Lloyd Bridges. I really don't know how this film ended up being as boring as it did, but I can only presume it's because the director is a complete and total tit. Bear Island is a 1979 Anglo-Canadian thriller film loosely based on the 1971 novel Bear Island by Alistair MacLean. Joining the expedition via a helicopter is marine biologist Donald Sutherland who, it will transpire, has a link to the island.have been trying to get it for her on DVD for ages as a video copy she had had been watched to death. Drafted at 19 into the Royal Navy, he worked his way up from Ordinary Seaman to Leading Torpedo Officer while serving in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Far East. Film rights came solely into the hands of the Canadian-born Peter Snell who had lived in England since 1961. Time was you only had to mention Nazi gold and you’d have a loyal readership clamouring for more, but as the decades moved to the nineteen-eighties, it was all sounding a bit old hat, and Raiders of the Lost Ark illustrated that something particularly special had to be done with the villains of so many years from the thirties onwards to make a genuine impact from then on.