Donald Sutherland attempts a flawed hero, but he doesn’t have much to work with, which includes a particularly vapid Redgrave. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License and the GFDL; additional terms may apply.

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. The downside of this professionalism is that some viewers might be skeptical that they actually pulled this off. Like most any mystery, guilt will be cast across each character as the tale unfolds letting the viewers play along. It doesn't take us long to discover that on board one of the abandoned U-boats is a the stuff to give "Goldfinger' a wet dream - and someone amongst them is determined to secure it. Bear Island is a 1979 Anglo-Canadian thriller film loosely based on the 1971 novel Bear Island by Alistair MacLean.However, due to this movie's disappointing box-office performance, "Goodbye, California", and the other titles were never made by producer Peter Snell, who had bought the rights to numerous MacLean works in 1975, including ones at the time that had not even been published or written yet. An American (Donald Sutherland) and a Norwegian (Vanessa Redgrave) fall prey to an ex-Nazi (Richard Widmark) seeking gold from a U-boat in the Arctic. The team is led by the German scientists Gerran and his deputy Hartman , and includes Norwegian psychiatrist Lindquist and the laconic Pole Lechinski . I don't think you can make films about film units," he later said adding "I think possibly we tried to put too much meaning and too much cast into an action adventure story. 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.

Gerran forbids access to the old U-boat base, but it becomes apparent that Lansing is very interested in it - his father was a U-boat commander who died there. They transform the challenging nature of Bear Island into their own playground, finding ice-cold waves and precipitous slopes. 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. Boom in Canadian Film Making Hits Snag: Explosion in Canadian Movies Stuck With the Movie 'A Necessary Shakeup' Begging for Distribution Shortage of Producers' ".The true adventures of the world's greatest stuntman : my life as Indiana Jones, James Bond, Superman and other movie heroes. 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). It has all the Maclean obsessions: Spies, betrayal, explosions, inhospitable terrain, snow, and loads of mystery and murder.

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. The crew's doctor, Marlowe, finds himself enmeshed in a violent, multi-layered plot in which very few of the persons aboard are whom they claim to be. The original novel was published in 1971 and became a best-seller, selling over eight million copies. An international scientific expedition from the UN heads to the barren Arctic Bear Island to study climate change.Snell, however, did get The Hostage Tower (1980) and Detonator II: Night Watch (1995) made for television. Bear Island is a 1979 adventure movie directed by Don Sharp and based on the novel by Alistair MacLean ( Puppet on a Chain).