Ice Station Zebra: Chilly reception

The 1968 North Pole thriller was intended to be a blockbuster. Instead, due to changing audience tastes it simply went bust.

MGM in 1968 really wanted you to go see Ice Station Zebra, a big budget military/scifi thriller. The studio pulled out all the stops to get you off your couch: The movie was shot in Super Panavision and released in a special 70 mm edition that featured an overture, an intermission and an entre acte. Zebra was almost three hours long and boasted a roster of stars leading with Rock Hudson. It was, in short, an event.

And it bombed terribly, failing even to recoup its production costs.

For years, studios had been presenting their most commercial offerings as spectacles, using widescreen, stereo sound and vibrant color to compete with television. (Think The Ten Commandments or Ben Hur or The Sound of Music.) It worked . . . for a while.

The problem was that by the end of the 60s, movies such as Ice Station Zebra were no longer simply competing with TV. They were competing with the New Hollywood, films that broke convention and offered moviegoers new experiences. The year before had seen the release of Bonnie and Clyde, a landmark film with French New Wave DNA littered with shocking violence that altered the idea of what was possible in American cinema. Other provocative pictures were released that year, including The Graduate and Cool Hand Luke.

By the time 1968 arrived, the industry was in the throes of a full-blown revolution. In the months before Zebra was released, moviegoers had been treated to the likes of The Producers, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey (also from MGM), Rosemary’s Baby, Bullitt, Night of the Living Dead, and Once Upon a Time in the West. (1968 was a rough year for America but a great year for movies.)

How’s a straight-ahead, old-fashioned Cold War thriller going to stand toe-for-toe with damn, dirty apes and a sentient computer named HAL, not to mention the psychedelic head trip at the end of 2001? Well, it couldn’t. The submarine movie, if you’ll forgive the metaphor, took on water and sank to the bottom quickly. There were no survivors.

To be fair, the industry at the time was trying to hold on to the more traditional patrons (meaning “old”) while also courting those who wanted to revel in the new freedom. So side-to-side with the avant garde were reliable middlebrow staples such as Doctor Dolittle, Camelot and The Green Berets (a pro-Vietnam War movie starring John Wayne). In that environment, it was reasonable to believe the big-budget action picture could still work, particularly given the source material. Zebra was based on a thriller by Scottish author Alistair MacLean, whose work could be found in airports and bookstores everywhere when I was growing up. They were books about manly men taking on impossible missions in exotic locales, novels like The Guns of Navarone, which was, in fact, turned into a terrific movie starring Gregory Peck.

Zebra also boasted John Sturges as a director, who had helmed successful man’s-man pictures such as Bad Day at Black Rock, The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape during an up-and-down career. He seemed ideal for the assignment.

Navarone, however, was released seven years earlier in 1961 when the nation was in a very different place. And Zebra feels absolutely like a companion piece. Adding to that 60s vibe was the by then-unavoidable sense that one was watching a James Bond film without Bond, particularly when MI6 agent Patrick McGoohan shows up. The opening scene of Zebra feels lifted from 1967’s You Only Live Twice.

But there are reasons beyond timing why Zebra doesn’t quite work, starting with its leading man. Initially, the idea had been to reunite Peck and David Niven, the stars of Navarone, for this MacLean thriller. The result would have been a smarter, tougher film. But by the time filming began, Peck had been replaced by Rock Hudson, and Niven was gone, as well. I’ve never particularly been a fan of Hudson’s, even his light comedies with Doris Day. Hudson to me always felt like a copy of a copy of a copy, a more generic version of the masculine archetypes played by Gary Cooper and Peck. While he wasn’t bad at being stalwart, he failed to bring much gravitas or dynamism to the screen. In the film, his Navy captain is overshadowed by McGoohan, Brown and even Borgnine. (I can’t imagine him rising to Peck’s dramatic level in On the Beach, another Cold War submarine movie.) Accordingly, this pretty much marked the end of Hudson’s movie career; he would soon move to TV in “McMillan and Wife.” (And it was the wife, Susan Saint James, who brought in the viewers.)

The film itself similarly feels generic. Everything in Zebra comes across as rehashed as a two-day-old plate of Thanksgiving leftovers. And, honestly, like finding that plate in the fridge, there is some satisfaction involved. The story involves an American sub captained by Hudson that sent on a mysterious mission below the polar ice cap to retrieve a bunch of British scientists and a missing U.S. satellite. Zebra traffics in Cold War tropes. It’s a Nuclear Sub Movie, a Control Room Movie (nervous men smoking and standing in front of control panels, both on shore and in the sub), a Downed Satellite Movie, a Saboteur is Among Us Movie, a Get There Before the Russians Do Movie, and even a Mutual Respect Movie (One day, perhaps, we will be allies!). And it has Ernest Borgnine playing a Russian scientist. No one in cinema history has ever seemed less of a Russian and less of a scientist.

It also –and I cannot stress this enough – includes a scene in which JIM BROWN IS LOWERED BY HELICOPTER ONTO THE SUBMARINE. I would have happily forked over my $1.30 to see that in 1968. What were you people back then holding onto that money for? Grass? Yeah, probably grass.

Oh, and Jim Brown? Yes, that Jim Brown, of the Cleveland Browns. The greatest running back who ever lived who famously retired at the height of his fame to pursue an acting career. (Which, if you are somehow unfamiliar, is a very Cleveland Browns thing to happen.) As an actor, Brown was, well, let’s be kind and say he had an undeniable presence. You’re gonna pay attention if Jim Brown is stomping around your submarine. That’s something. Brown plays “Captain Anders,” a no-nonsense Marine who scowls at everyone. (I assume Brown was like that in contract negotiations with Art Modell.) And of course as the only Black member of the cast, he is killed off as quickly as possible.

The movie is actually engaging for much of its first half, as the mission comes together, the sub launches and the men jockey over their orders. (There is not a single woman in the film.) McGoohan, an Irish-American actor who was filming the groundbreaking British TV show “The Prisoner”at the time, is the best part of the movie, suitably droll and dangerous.¹ There are some moderately exciting scenes as the sub tries to navigate through polar ice floes. But here is thing: There are also so many lovingly crafted widescreen shots of the sub splitting the surface of the ocean that it’s clear the filmmakers thought they were delivering something epic. Like it was Lawrence of Arabia at sea or something.

But months earlier, as I noted above, films such as 2001 and Apes had changed everything about what people expected at the movies. You couldn’t experience something like 2001 and then look at a piece of popcorn entertainment like Zebra without feeling like you’ve lost a tiny piece of your soul. The special effects in the latter film are laughable, starting with the Soviet jet fighters that look like cast-iron toys and culminating in a climax ostensibly set at the North Pole that is so clearly filmed on a set with styrofoam boulders that the movie loses all credibility.

Beyond the seismic shift taking place in Hollywood, it was the wrong moment in the culture to put forward a film built around stolid government agents, established hierarchies and institutional directives. By October 1968, America had endured the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Riots consumed urban centers in places like Washington, D.C. The Democratic Convention in Chicago was marred by clashes with protestors. And of course, the Vietnam War and the dissonance between the official version and what was happening on the ground hung over everything.

Rock Hudson, himself a studio creation,² captaining a nuclear sub backed supported by a bunch of clean-cut, unquestioning Marines on a mission to outpace the Russians seemed hopelessly square and out of touch. Moreover, the idea of the implacable Soviet adversary was being replaced by a more troubling notion: that the enemy might be our own government or the factions that were dividing American society.

The story, however, did not end there. As we know, the 60s counterculture faded away, New Hollywood collapsed beneath its own excess, the Cold War got a new lease on life as a film subject in the 1980s. Truth is, Ice Station Zebra walked so that superior films such as Crimson Tide and The Hunt for Red October could run. That’s not such a bad legacy.³ But the film will always exist as more curiosity than accomplishment, a museum exhibit illustrating how quickly audiences’ tastes can change. The movie also was the progenitor of another cultural phenomenon that would take root in the 1970s, the all-star disaster movie. Producers trying sell tickets seats soon learned that an extra thematic element was necessary to keep the popcorn film alive: Unforeseen, spectacular danger. Four years later, Borgnine would star in The Poseidon Adventure. The trick, see, was to take the boat and flip it over. Now that was a movie.

WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Ice Station Zebra is rentable on Amazon Prime Video.

HEY ISN’T THAT: Lloyd Nolan, who plays a U.S. admiral in the film, had a terrific career as a leading man and then a character actor, culminating in 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters. He also starred as detective Mike Shayne in a series of fun and witty movies in the 1940s that are worth checking out.

ARMAGEDDON INDEX (4/10): No polar bears were harmed in the making of this film, although a few careers were.

DUST CLOUDS: The incident that inspired Ice Station Zebra involved the failed American reconnaissance satellite Discoverer 2 in 1959, during the early years of the Cold War space race. Part of the highly secret CORONA spy satellite program, Discoverer 2 was intended to photograph Soviet territory from orbit and eject a film capsule back to Earth for midair recovery. Instead, after orbiting successfully, its reentry capsule malfunctioned and came down far off target near the Arctic island of Spitsbergen, in territory close to the Soviet sphere of influence. American intelligence feared the capsule — which potentially contained classified surveillance technology and evidence of U.S. spying capabilities — might be recovered by the Soviets before the Americans could reach it. The mission to locate the capsule fell on Air Force Col. “Moose” Mathison (Really.) But the capsule was never found, and it remains unclear whether the Soviets got their hands on it. The CORONA program, ultimately involved145 flights in eight satellite series, the last mission launching in 1972.

TOP OF THE POPS: The number-one song on the Billboard chart on October 23, 1968 was “Hey Jude” by the Beatles. If you play the track backward it says “McGoohan” over and over again.

WHAT ELSE I’M WATCHING: TV: Rooster (S1, HBO Max), Dark Matter (S1, Apple), Peter Gunn (S1, Amazon).

LAST ENTRY: Letters From a Dead Man (1986)

NEXT ENTRY: Invasion USA (1952)

1. McGoohan probably didn’t have the career he should have had given how interesting he could be on screen. He will always be associated with “The Prisoner,” a truly original work about a spy who is abducted and held captive in a mysterious seaside village. But he appeared in and directed several episodes of “Columbo” in the 70s. Watching McGoohan and Peter Falk go at it were high points of that series.

2. Hudson was one the final products of the Hollywood studio factory. Born Roy Harold Scherer Jr. in Winnetka, Illinois, he was renamed “Rock Hudson” by his agent. (He reportedly always loathed the name.) He remained closeted for most of his life until 1985, when he revealed he had AIDS and became the first prominent American celebrity to die from the disease. Sadly, Hudson was heckled at the Hollywood premiere of Ice Station Zebra — not because of the film’s quality, but because of longstanding rumors about his sexuality. He never attended a film opening again.

3. Strangely, Zebra was one of Howard Hughes’ favorite movies. As legend has it, when Hughes was in his reclusive Vegas phase, he was so frustrated by the local TV station not showing films he liked that he bought the station and mandated that it play Zebra over and over again. The movie was also among the favorite films of Jimmy McGill of “Better Call Saul.”