Climate change has been a source of major concern for a long time, at least judging by the way it found its way into the script for Bear Island, a 1979 British-Canadian thriller directed by Don Sharp. The plot, based on the best-selling novel by Alistair MacLean, begins as a United Nations expedition sends an international team of experts, led by the German Professor Otto Gerran (played by Richard Widmark), to conduct scientific research on Bear Island, a remote piece of land in the Arctic Ocean. The latest addition to the team is the American scientist Frank Lansing (played by Donald Sutherland), but his motives for participation aren’t completely scientific. Lansing’s father was the commander of a German U-boat during the Second World War and died on Bear Island, which had been a German submarine base at the time. Soon after landing on the island, members of the expedition begin to perish in various accidents, and Lansing doesn’t need much to conclude that someone within their ranks is a murderer. Nazi-looted gold, hidden within a submarine in the abandoned base, might be the motive for the crime.
Alistair MacLean’s novels served as the basis for many commercially successful and even some iconic action films. Bear Island, known at the time of production as the most expensive Canadian film ever made, proved to be a major flop at the box office and was criticised by reviewers. The producers invested a lot of effort, and director Sharp barely survived shooting at the subarctic locations in British Columbia and Alaska, whilst his crew had to rely on a Soviet ship for logistics. Those sacrifices, however, weren’t enough to make a good film. Bear Island works only when the locations are put to good use, which happens only in a couple of action scenes at the very end. For most of the film, the plot unfolds indoors and looks more like an uninspired Agatha Christie mystery, with the otherwise great cast burdened by unconvincing accents (Vanessa Redgrave as a Norwegian, Widmark as a German, Christopher Lee as Polish/Russian). Sutherland obviously enjoys the opportunity to display some of his martial skills in the film’s effective, although plotwise unnecessary, scene, but this can’t compensate for the film’s other flaws, most notably Sharp’s direction in scenes that happen in the dark and are mostly confusing. Bear Island, although watchable, can be recommended only to the most loyal of Sutherland’s fans.
RATING: 4/10 (++)
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