{"id":6627,"date":"2024-10-23T13:12:47","date_gmt":"2024-10-23T17:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=6627"},"modified":"2025-07-21T12:56:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T16:56:12","slug":"bear-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/10\/23\/bear-island\/","title":{"rendered":"Bear Island"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Bear Island<\/strong> (1979)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 United Artists\/Action-Thriller\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 112 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (language, violence)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Don Sharp\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: David Butler and Don Sharp\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Robert Farnon\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Alan Hume\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: January 16, 1981 (Philadelphia, PA)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Donald Sutherland, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Lloyd Bridges, Barbara Parkins, Lawrence Dane, Patricia Collins, Bruce Greenwood, Michael J. Reynolds, Nicholas Cortland, August Schellenberg, Candace O\u2019Connor, Joseph Golland, Richard Wren, Mark Jones, Hagen Beggs, Michael Collins, Robert Stelmach, Terry Waterhouse.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: N\/A<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: **<\/p>\n

\u00a0I stand by my assertion that bad movies from back in the day are made better by today\u2019s bad movies. Let\u2019s take a look at Bear Island<\/strong>, a British-Canadian production featuring an all-star cast and a screenplay adapted from an Alistair MacLean novel. Consider that last part for a moment. Some of the author\u2019s novels- e.g. The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare and Breakheart Pass- have successfully been translated to the big screen. Not the case with Bear Island<\/strong> which, to be accurate, is only loosely based on the book.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Made in 1979, it was the most expensive Canadian movie at the time with a price tag of $12 million. It didn\u2019t open in US theaters until January \u201981. I went with my dad and little brother to a Sunday matinee at the City Line Theater. I didn\u2019t really want to see it as the reviews were significantly less than praising. I tried talking Dad into seeing Nine to Five instead, but his mind was made up, his rationale being that it couldn\u2019t be all that bad with MacLean\u2019s name attached. Well, parents make mistakes too. Bear Island<\/strong> started out pretty good, but eventually lost momentum becoming a turgid, muddled mess of an action-thriller.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Bear Island<\/strong> involves a UN scientific expedition comprised of scientists from different countries to study climate change on remote, snow and ice-covered Bear Island (north of Norway). At least that\u2019s the official story. Because it\u2019s Alistair MacLean, we already know most of them aren\u2019t who they claim to be. Like marine biologist Frank Lansing (Sutherland, Eye of the Needle) who\u2019s really interested in finding out what became of his father. You see, his father was the commander of a German U-boat that disappeared shortly before the war ended. As it so happens, Bear Island is the former site of a Nazi U-boat base. Guess whose U-boat Lansing finds?<\/p>\n

\u00a0So let me cut right to the chase and tell you what everybody is really after, a huge shipment of Nazi gold. Who else wants it? There are a couple of Nazis unhappy about how the war turned out. The head guy (or gal) is code-named \u201cZelda\u201d. Christopher Lee (The Curse of Frankenstein) plays a Pole suspected of being KGB. Richard Widmark (Kiss of Death) plays expedition leader Professor Otto Gerran, a Norwegian once suspected a Nazi sympathizer, but since cleared even though a cloud of suspicion remains. Why is he so adamantly against anybody radioing for help? Lloyd Bridges (Airplane) plays an American who seems to know what\u2019s going on. Vanessa Redgrave (Julia) plays the Norwegian psychiatrist who becomes Lansing\u2019s love interest. Any one (or more than one) could be behind the mysterious accidents claiming the lives of other expedition members.<\/p>\n

\u00a0At 13, what struck me about Bear Island<\/strong> was how violent it was for a PG movie. It opens with a hapless skier being run over by a snowmobile. Over the next 102 minutes, a woman is buried alive in an avalanche, another gets it with an ice axe and somebody is killed with a flare gun. There\u2019s a rough, prolonged fist fight, an explosion and a snowmobile crash. I should have loved it, but I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The main problem with Bear Island<\/strong> is one of pacing. With everything that\u2019s going on, it\u2019s hard to believe it\u2019s slow and boring. That\u2019s on top of the hammy acting and terrible fake accents. On the upside, Bear Island<\/strong> has some great scenery and cinematography. The cold, snowy locations (it was actually shot in British Columbia and Alaska) make for a nice dramatic backdrop. The scenes in the underground caverns with the long dormant U-boats and their skeleton crews (literally skeletons!) are pretty cool. The movie has some great sets.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The idea of an all-star cast is always cool even if the overall performances aren\u2019t all that good. Bear Island<\/strong> is one of those movies that call for a poster with the actors\u2019 faces in little boxes below the title. It has atmosphere and action, but fails to generate much in the way of suspense or tension. It\u2019s a bad movie, no question about it. But I don\u2019t hate it. It is watchable albeit barely. It\u2019s definitely more bearable than today\u2019s bad movies. It doesn\u2019t resort to CGI and noise to compensate for the areas in which it\u2019s sorely lacking.<\/p>\n

\u00a0It goes without saying that Bear Island<\/strong> flopped at the box office losing every single penny of its budget. It was also the last time anybody attempted a big budget adaptation of one of MacLean\u2019s novels (at least for the big screen). As bad as it is, I\u2019ll go ahead and call it a semi-guilty pleasure.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Here\u2019s what I want to know. Virtually all sources list the movie\u2019s running time as 118 minutes yet all existing copies are only 102 minutes. What happened to the 16 unaccounted minutes? That\u2019s the real mystery.<\/p>\n

UPDATE [July 21, 2025]: I found a copy with a 112-minute running time. I don’t know what scenes weren’t in the shorter version, but I still feel exactly the same about the film. Now what about the still-missing six minutes?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bear Island (1979)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 United Artists\/Action-Thriller\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 112 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG (language, violence)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Don Sharp\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: David Butler and Don Sharp\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Robert Farnon\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Alan Hume\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: January 16, 1981 (Philadelphia, PA)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Donald Sutherland, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark, Christopher Lee, Lloyd Bridges, Barbara Parkins, Lawrence Dane, Patricia Collins, Bruce Greenwood, Michael J. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6839,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-suspense-thrillers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Bear-Island-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6627"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12591,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6627\/revisions\/12591"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}