Ice Station Zebra (1968) – DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan, Jim Brown
screenplay by Douglas Heyes, based on the novel by Alistair MacLean
directed by John Sturges

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Imagine a lobotomized, irony-free Antonioni relocating White Desert to the North Pole and you'll have a hint of the freakishly chilled formalism that drives John Sturges's Ice Station Zebra. So consumed is it with the gleam of grey steel and the snap of pale Styrofoam that it chucks all considerations of pacing, character development, and ideological orientation. It's a thriller without thrills, a drama without drama, a cold-war bromide barely aware of what hemisphere it's in; all it knows is that the cold, clean surfaces of metal and ice are pretty pretty pretty (please don't touch me). But despite its trouncing of the basics of pop excitement, the picture makes a surprisingly good case for its necrophiliac obsession. Considering the standard-issue material it has to work with, it at least succeeds as an anomaly where a regular production would have failed as hackwork.

This massive roadshow extravaganza pits Cmdr. James Ferraday (a fittingly inert Rock Hudson) against the chill of the arctic in a race to a lost weather outpost. After a briefing on the base-that-is-more-than-a-base, Ferraday plops into a nuclear submarine with squirrelly Brit David Jones (Patrick McGoohan) and reformed Russian Boris Vaslov (nice try, Ernest Borgnine), who are both good to go. Their vessel runs silent, runs deep for a little while, stopping to break some surface ice when an act of sabotage causes the sub to take in water. (Despite the death of a crewmember and the bewilderment of Ferraday, the impact on our consciousness is just about nil.) More action follows, with a puncturing of ice that's too Freudian to be believed; following an intermission, the nitty-gritty of why we should care about the titular Station is pretty much nailed down–not that we really notice.

There is a bit of cold-war brinkmanship going on here involving satellite camera footage, but it seems completely beside the point: the name of the game is crushing, deep-focus artificiality, rendered with a good deal of stylized craft and no amount of actual artistry. On the other hand, Ice Station Zebra's impersonality is almost a plus in this case, as the warmth of a human personality might spoil the imposing dead weight of the production and thus the oddity that raises it out of the muck of anti-Communist banality. Despite the occasional slur as well as the transparent use of Jim Brown as a noble but expendable flunky, the film is oblivious, taking the position that as long as we get to touch cold, hard things, everything will be fine. It's a desperate Severin flung down in front of a metallic Venus in Furs–and if that ain't art, it sure is compellingly bizarre.

Viewers from a post-'60s generation could be excused for forgetting the unrest exploding outside of the film's contemporary showings: not only were those clashes white-hot (in both senses of the word), but they were also concerned with a fight over the nature of human interactions. Ice Station Zebra doesn't exactly speak that language, failing even as a historical document of how Hollywood perceived the world–if it's conservative, it's without convictions, and one can easily imagine some competing Soviet super-production following the exact same outline. The film is mostly concerned with the faceless erotica of the hardware, which sometimes comes with its own conservative connotations but here feels merely parasitic on its government's fleet of devices. No surprise that Ice Station Zebra was Howard Hughes's favourite film: it's almost as obsessed with cleanliness and machines as he was.

THE DVD
Warner's DVD presentation of Ice Station Zebra is as gleaming as the fetish object it represents. The 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer looks remarkably crisp and appropriately muted no matter the lighting situation, though to nitpick, the second-unit underwater stuff can get a little fuzzy. Meanwhile, the Dolby Digital 5.1 remix sounds superb, striking that crucial balance between fullness and sharpness while finding creative uses for the discrete surrounds. There's a nice submarine hum that permeates the rear channels, too, while the bass really churns on Michel Legrand's disproportionately passionate score. The only major extra is "The Man Who Makes a Difference" (8 mins.), a vintage paean to second unit director John Stevens and his contributions to this and other films that's not especially informative, although its vanished POPULAR MECHANICS man-talk is interesting as a curio. Trailers for Ice Station Zebra, Bad Day at Black Rock, Giant, and Where Eagles Dare round out the platter.

150 minutes; G; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French Dolby Surround; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner