Ice Station Zebra – 3 stars

A perfectly serviceable John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven) Cold War action/espionage thriller from 1968, currently on Tubi. The Soviets take photographs of all of our missile installations from space, but in attempting to retrieve the film, things go awry. The canister lands near a British scientific weather station in the Arctic, and the race is on for retrieval before the Soviets get there. The mission is led by nuclear submarine skipper Rock Hudson, who has MI6 spook Patrick McGoohan, friendly Soviet Ernest Borgnine, and Marine squad leader Jim Brown along for the ride.

I watched the flick when I was a little kid on TV. It was thrilling.

50 years later, it still holds up somewhat. It’s really worth catching for three particularities.

First, clearly of its time, a significant portion of this rather long picdture (it has both an overture and an intermission) is devoted to the inner workings of a nuclear submarine, sometimes, pedantically so. But you have to remind yourself that in 1968, film audiences would have been thrilled with a long dissertation on the inner workings of a nuclear submarine.

Second, I never understood why McGoohan was not a massive star. He is a great villain, but he also has a charming smile and twinkle in the eye that communicates humor and a little menace.

I read up on him. He was swallowed up by television, which probably suppressed a budding film career. He was also extremely Catholic, and would not take any role in which he was required to kiss a woman other than his wife, thereby taking him off the James Bond list (and apparently, he was on it).  Modern audiences would know McGoohan as the villainous king who steals and chews scenes in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

Lastly, Jim Brown is still cool, even in a winter parka.