Ice Station Zebra |
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starring: Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan, David Ford, Jim Brown directed by: John Sturges  List Price: $14.98 Amazon.com's Price: $12.49 You Save: $2.49 (17%)as of 09/02/2010 18:13 EDT Availability: Usually ships in 6 to 9 days
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Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1Audience Rating: G (General Audience) Binding: DVD Brand: Warner Brothers EAN: 9780790747729 Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC ISBN: 0790747723 Item Dimensions: Label: Warner Home Video Languages: Manufacturer: Warner Home Video MPN: 012569524828 Number Of Discs: 1 Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Warner Home Video Region Code: 1 Release Date: January 11, 2005 Running Time: 150 minutes Studio: Warner Home Video Theatrical Release Date: October 23, 1968 Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product Description: Russian and American agents race towards the North Pole to recover a lost capsule of important military information. Amazon.com: Out of step with the public mood when it was released in 1968, Ice Station Zebra has held up decently as a Guy's Movie. Based on an Alistair MacLean novel, the film is half submarine picture and half spy puzzler, short on action but long on military chatter and espionage gamesmanship. Rock Hudson, looking seasoned and just a little miffed, gives one of his better performances as the captain of a nuclear sub, ordered to the Arctic to check out a disturbance at a research station on the floating ice. He doesn't know the mission, but he's stuck with mysterious passengers: haughty British agent Patrick McGoohan, back-slapping Russian operative Ernest Borgnine, and hostile Marine captain Jim Brown. McGoohan gets the film's best lines and finest fur jacket, but Brown is pretty cool in a smaller role. John Sturges directs, with customary deliberateness; at times the movie seems to be suffering from iron-poor blood. Much of the dialogue is pretty sharp, especially in the submarine half, enough to keep you engrossed if you're in the mood for this kind of thing. When the action shifts to the ice, the studio-bound sets inevitably take their toll. It's not hard to see how this large, old-fashioned project misfired in the era of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, but the more tantalizing question is: Why did this movie become an obsessive favorite of Howard Hughes? Maybe he liked how clean it all looks. --Robert Horton Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Ice Station ZebraExcellent movie, lots of action, lots of mystery, look back into the Cold War and see the tension that was the time. Six out of five stars. Rating:  - Passable but I'd expect better from cast and directorWith such an assembly of actors and a director who knew his stuff, I honestly expected more from a film taken from a great book, but sadly it didn't do the book or the cast justice. Where was the exciting fire aboard the submarine after the rescue? It had gone. Instead we had a company of Russian troops being parachuted down to confront a company of US Marines who had been carried on the submarine to the Ice Station (neither the Russian or the American troops had been in the book) and to me it seemed the show-down between the two sides was as frustrating as the storyline; great potential but nothing really happened - it was like opening a huge box of a present and finding a tiny uninteresting object inside. It would have been better to dispense with the pointless confrontation between the two armies and concentrate on the story of why secret agents from the UK and Soviet Union were there anyway. What about the characters of the Ice Station? Almost ignored and passed over, they were just names, yet Ernest Borgnine and Patrick McGoohan knew each by name, and as these two guys were spies it stood to reason the blokes on the Ice Station were also spies or at least in cahoots, and would have known something. Too much made of making it like a Cold War stand off and not enough injected into it of a man hunt between the protagonist and antagonist. We had a brief flash at the end but by then I'd lost interest and couldn't care who was what or what happened to them. Rating:  - Mediocre quality & bad plot changesI enjoyed and admired the book _Ice Station Zebra_. Wish I could say the same for the movie. One quibble is with the acting. Rock Hudson acquitted himself well as the submarine commander, but Patrick McGoohan alternated strangely between mystery and buffoonery; Ernest Borgnine was a bad parody of a Russian; and Jim Brown looked like a football player trying to act. The weird musical interruptions at the start and at "Intermission" time were a jarring note. So were the bad special effects trying to show Soviet jet fighters zooming around. Worst of all, though, was the desecration of Alistair Maclean's original plot. That one had long sequences of mysterious action, intelligence operations, and the good and bad guys trying to stay a step ahead of each other. The movie plot introduces two new goofy major characters (played by Borgnine & Brown), as well as an unrealistic confrontation between US/British and Soviet forces. Some other film versions of Maclean thrillers, such as _The Guns of Navarone_ and _Where Eagles Dare_, are well worth watching. The film version of _Ice Station Zebra_ left me, in a word, cold. Rating: - An unrevealed plotSome good excitement through an unrevealed turn of events. Good acting. Fast shipping. Rating: - Hudson Makes CaptainRock Hudson was always a better actor than many gave him credit for, he was so believable in any role, at this time he finished "Seconds" some felt that seconds was he best film, I content movies like "Zebra" are more difficult you can say that Hudson is in his element it's tough to play yourself, when we all know Rock wasn't captain but he connivence he was the captain of the boat. That's true acting, See "Ice Station Zebra" you will not be disappointed. 
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