Ice Station Zebra (1968)
Whenever Ice Station Zebra (1968) is mentioned, people feel compelled to say that it was Howard Hughes’s favourite film, as if there was some significance to be found there. I do not know if it was his favourite film, and none of the books and articles about Hughes I have checked made that claim. What he had was an unhealthy obsession with it, which is not the same thing. A quote from Wired:
In the billionaire's final months, aids reported that the turgid action-adventure film ran through the projector over 150 times in an endless loop. "Ice Station Zebra will probably remain indelibly imprinted on the minds of his entourage for the rest of their lives," wrote James Phelan in Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years.1
This is confirmed in Howard Hughes: The Untold Story (“If we watched it once, we watched it a hundred times.”)2
But as Hughes was possessed with various unhealthy obsessions, this is not particularly revealing. I do not suppose people would gleefully burst out “Did you know it was Howard Hughes’s favourite film?!?!?” if the film he was maniacally rewatching had been, for example, Wild Strawberries (1957) or Citizen Kane (1941). Hughes’s relationship with Ice Station Zebra seems to some to say something about that film, taint it in some way, and give it a certain aura. I find this peculiar.
Ice Station Zebra and me have a history too, but less extreme. I loved it as a kid and it was one of the very first films I bought on VHS. I have watched it on that tape, and on TV, and on big screens in 70mm. Now I have just bought what seemed to have been the last remaining blu-ray disc of it in Sweden, and rewatched it yet again. Never have I seen it looking so good. As it was shot in Super Panavision 703 it cries out for the biggest screen you can find, it was shown in Cinerama format at selected cinemas when it came out, but I can still appreciate it at home. It is a highly accomplished piece of cinema. I do not claim it is “a forgotten masterpiece,” only that it is a good film which has been important to me since my teenage years, and that it is a good illustration of some aspects of film criticism and film history research that I have issues with. It was also my first encounter with the filmmaker John Sturges, and he has remained one of my favourite directors ever since.
The story comes from Alistair MacLean’s novel with the same name, published in 1963. A British polar expedition on the North Pole sends out a distress signal and then goes silent. As there is a heavy snowstorm covering the area, a US nuclear submarine is sent north to reach the place from beneath the ice. They are in competition with the Soviet Union about who can reach it first because some secrets valuable to either side of the Cold War are said to be at the ice station.
Martin Ransohoff, at Filmways Pictures, had bought the rights to it, and eventually Sturges was set to direct it. The same year the novel came out Sturges had released one of his biggest hits, The Great Escape (1963), and was at the time a powerful figure in American cinema, producing and directing whatever he wanted to make. Since 1958 he had been in association with The Mirisch Company, an independent production company, and in 1967 he made Hour of the Gun, a tense and bitter story about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. It is a genuinely great film, and Sturges was near his peak at this time.4
While Sturges was not a writer himself, he was involved in the scripts of his films and hired and fired writers to get what he wanted. A script Paddy Chayefsky had written based on MacLean’s novel was not to Sturges’s likening so he fired him and went through several other writers until he got something he liked, by Douglas Heyes. This is one of the things I find fascinating about Ice Station Zebra. It is seemingly a big, old-fashioned studio production (I was long under the misapprehension that it was produced by MGM) made during the collapse of the studio system. Yet it is not produced by a studio, Ransohoff got MGM attached to the project as distributor, and it is thoroughly a John Sturges film, who had almost complete freedom when he made it. "We'll give you anything you want." Sturges was told,5 and he has said he felt more empowered on it than on any other film.6 It is not his best film, but that is something else. It has his stamp on it, all the way through.
Ransohoff had bought the rights because he was inspired by the immense commercial success of The Guns of Navarone (1961), also based on a novel by Alistair MacLean. That was a serious film, and so is Ice Station Zebra. It is not satiric or anarchic or counterculture or anything else that the late 1960s was, allegedly, about. Another MacLean adaptation from the same year, Where Eagles Dare (1968), directed by Brian G. Hutton and also distributed by MGM, is revealingly different. It is almost farcical at times, nihilistic as well as crude.7 (It is ridiculous how often I watched Where Eagles Dare on VHS as a teen, and that I once knew most of the dialogue by heart. Oh well…)
It is usually claimed that Ice Station Zebra was a box office failure. A figure of $4.6 million is often mentioned and “weak ticket sales.”8 But if you check contemporary box office reports in, for example, Variety or Boxoffice, Ice Station Zebra was doing rather well. Some weeks it was the highest grossing film, and was for many weeks in the top ten. It was doing great business in Canada and the UK too, and at the end of 1969 it was among the top grossing films in the US. Calling it a failure seems wrong. Variety reported on 12 February, 1969, that Filmways (the production company) expected it to break even.9
My experience researching historic box office figures in general is that they are confusing and often unreliable, and critics and historians usually mention such figures without needed context and specificity. Are they grosses? Rentals? Only domestic, or foreign too? Was the film in question unpopular, or was it a box office success but too expensive to make and could still not recover its costs? How do the figures compare to other films that year? Unless you know the answers to these questions, it is wiser to not use box office figures as part of your argument.
Elsewhere I have described the mood of Sturges’s films as uplifting yet downbeat. It sounds like a contradiction but how it works becomes clear when watching the films; the confident and forceful style and the celebration of a close group of people working together is the uplifting part, and the ironies, ambivalences, and the open, if not outright tragic, endings are the downbeat part. While far from all of his films are about groups working together, the mood is there even when they are not. Sturges’s cool, clean, clear, uncluttered images are here as well. (I have written more about Sturges, his career, style, and themes before, for example here.)
Sturges was a socially conscious liberal, and his films reflect this. Something he disliked about an early script version for Ice Station Zebra was its flag-waving patriotism, of which there is nothing in his film. Critics like to call this or that film “a personal film,” and it is not clear exactly what that means. There is no reason to assume that this film is any less personal for Sturges than the films of Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini are for them, unless by personal you mean autobiographical. Sturges’s ability to make Ice Station Zebra his own despite the pressure, the special effects, and the type of film he was making and its known source, is basic auteurism; not complicated or theoretical.
Another reason for why I like the film so much is the cast, two of which, Patrick McGoohan and Rock Hudson, can be seen in the image above. Ernest Borgnine and Jim Brown are playing the other leading characters, and all four are good, especially Hudson who is perfect. McGoohan and Borgnine are both playing it a bit eccentric, and Brown is ice-cold professionalism. Hudson, who plays the captain of the submarine, while projecting total confidence and being at ease with himself and his surroundings, frequently has a bemused look on his face, as if everyone else, and the world at large, were his children and up to no good, so he has to take care of them all, but they are also children so he cannot be too mad at them. These three different kinds of performances work well together.10 McGoohan in particular was praised by many critics when the film opened.
At the end of the film, Alf Kjellin appears as a Soviet colonel. Kjellin was a star of Swedish films in the 1940s and 1950s, acting in several great films. He also directed a few himself, including Lustgården (1961), scripted by Ingmar Bergman and Erland Josephson. His career in the US, in the 1960s and 1970s, was primarily as a television director. He directed several episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-1965), Dr. Kildare (1964-1966), The Waltons (1972-1981) among many other famous series.
Something I have already alluded to is that the film is straight. No nonsense or self-depreciation, and the lack of tongue-in-cheek is satisfying. Nothing signals the film’s sense of itself more than the fact that it has an overture (two minutes), an intermission (three minutes), and exit music (two minutes). I am not sure if I have seen another film of this kind with such extravagance. It is wonderful. The music is by Michel Legrand.
When Ice Station Zebra came out even critics who liked it often thought that the submarine part was good but the end at the North Pole was unsatisfying, partly due to the obviously fake ice and snow. I agree that the first 90 minutes on the submarine are the best (the whole film is 150 minutes) and the underwater shots of the submarine under the ice are beautiful, they have an eerie feel to them. But I like the snow sets as well. They have their own quality. The scene when Soviet paratroopers suddenly appear in the sky, falling through the clouds, is especially good. The cinematographer was Daniel L. Fapp, who was nominated for an Academy Award.
A problem is the escalating double-crosses that happen on the ice, and undermotivated actions by some characters. Sturges felt the same way, having had problems coming up with an ending he was pleased with. My suggestion, had I been a script doctor, would have been to not have anyone being a double agent, and not let Lt. Walker act out of character. Those things are unnecessary.
"We made it up as we went along." Sturges once claimed,11 and maybe that is part of its charm for me. A multi-million dollar production and a massive undertaking, yet improvised along, while also being in tune with the established style and mood of its director. I am happy I bought that blu-ray so I could watch it yet again. I will end now with what might be its best scene:
Borgnine’s character, who has never been on a submarine before, asks about the nuclear reactor that powers the vessel. He is allowed to look down at it. We do not see it ourselves, only the orange glow from it, reflected in his face. He talks about it as if it were a living thing, “It seems almost benevolent.” The captain, Hudson, replies that “it hates being contained.” It is an unexpected moment of metaphysical symbolism that sends a shiver down my spine.
https://www.wired.com/2015/12/howard-hughess-screening-room/ The book by Phelan was published in 1977.
Brown, Peter Harry, and Pat H. Broeske, Howard Hughes: The Untold Story (2004). p. 348
It seems filming began in Ultra Panavision 70 but for some reason they switched to Super Panavision 70, according to 70 mm - Bigger Than Life (2009), an informative book published by Deutsche Kinemathek. The aspect ratio is different, Ultra is 2.76:1 whereas Super is 2.21:1.
Sturges was however more even in the 1950s and made his best film then: Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, which I wrote about here). The 1960s saw a combination of great films and weaker films.
Lowell, Glenn, Escape Artist - The Life and Films of John Sturges (2008). p. 264.
Ibid. p 268.
Where Eagles Dare did better at the box office, not least in Sweden where around 265 000 saw Ice Station Zebra but 1.4 million saw Where Eagles Dare.
Lowell (2008). p. 268.
That figure of $4.6 million for Ice Station Zebra is, I think, domestic rentals after one re-release.
There are no women in the film, as it is primarily set on a submarine and then on the North Pole. Sturges toyed with the idea of adding some dream sequence or something similar to be able to include some women, to satisfy the distributors, but thought better of it.
Lowell (2008). p. 267.