Ice Station Zebra
Short description
Ice Station Zebra is an American action adventure thriller set during the Cold War. A Soviet spy satellite carrying stolen Western technology fails and comes down near an isolated British research camp in the Arctic, which sends out distress signals before going silent. The American nuclear submarine Tigerfish, commanded by Cdr. James Ferraday, is sent to reach the station. Ferraday finds himself carrying unexpected passengers with their own agendas, and the rescue mission becomes a race against the Russians to reach what the satellite was carrying.
The film was directed by John Sturges, the thirteenth of the eighteen films he directed in chronological order, following Hour of the Gun and preceding Marooned. W.R. Burnett and Douglas Heyes wrote the screenplay, and Martin Ransohoff and John Calley produced it for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Filmways Pictures. Rock Hudson plays Ferraday, with Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan, Jim Brown, Tony Bill and Alf Kjellin among the credited cast of forty-five.
Ice Station Zebra runs 149 minutes and was released in April 1968. It was made for about 8 million dollars and took roughly 5 million dollars worldwide, so it did not recover its cost at the box office. On IMDb it holds a 6.6 rating from about 13,000 votes, and on TMDB a 6.4 from around 198 votes. A critics' rating of 5.5 from sixteen reviews places it below both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- In one scene, Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009) had to dive into the flooded torpedo compartment of a nuclear submarine and rescue a crew member trapped there. McGoohan was an excellent swimmer and insisted on performing the scene himself, rather than using a stunt double. The script was urgently changed to have McGoohan's character act in this scene not alone, but with the character of Murray Rose (1939-2012), who was an Olympic champion. This proved to be a very successful decision, as at one point, when the actors were standing waist-deep in water that was still rising, McGoohan's leg became stuck, and Rose had to dive to free his partner's leg.
- Billionaire Howard Hughes suffered from a mental disorder in the second half of his life. One manifestation of this was an obsession with watching the film "Ice Station Zebra." It is known that he equipped a home theater in the penthouse of the hotel where he lived and rewatched the film more than 150 times. According to Paul Virilio, who researched this phenomenon, the infinite rewatching of a single film manifested as a kind of escape from reality into a fictional world, which led to the disintegration of his personality.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
