ALL SCI-FI

[Pow]

We've got an excellent recipe for a terrific movie here, Bud.

[Bud Brewster]

[Pow]

Trivia about ISZ director John Sturges.

Credits: Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Gunfight at the O.K. Coral (1957), The Old Man and the Sea (1958), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and The Great Escape (1963).

Sidebar: Each and every one are very enjoyable films.

Sturges was known for losing control of his actors during filming.

Sidebar: I'd heard that about Magnificent Seven. I've never noticed in any of his movies where I thought that I caught that John was not in charge of his project. I'm sure there were behind the scenes issues given how moody & mercurial actors can be. Actors often want to run the show on film and TV productions. Let's face it, Sturges had some real tough type A actors to deal with in some of these films. Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner, and Steve McQueen were never known as the most cooperative actors on a set, or for their humble demeanors.

Sturges feuded with screenwriter Walter Newman on The Magnificent Seven & The Great Escape. He had Newman's credit removed from both films.

Sidebar: Looks like John had as big an ego as any of his actors. Interesting that he was fighting Walter on The Magnificent Seven in 1960, only to hire him again in 1963 for The Great Escape. Crazy business this showbiz.

Sturges directed documentaries and training films as a captain in the U.S. Army during WW II.

Sidebar: This probably was great training for Sturges directing career. I've often heard that directing the cast and crew for a TV series of film is much like being the general of an army.

Sturges received an Academy Award nomination for Bad Day at Black Rock.

He received the Golden Boot Award in 1992 for his westerns.

The Magnificent Seven & Bad Day at Black Rock are both preserved in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Sidebar: No love for The Great Escape, Congress? Based upon a true story of the heroic men who served in World War II.

Sturges considered legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosama's high compliment to him about how much he loved The Magnificent Seven, the highest praise he could ever receive. The Magnificent Seven was a remake of Kurosama's classic film the Seven Samurai. Akira would later send John a ceremonial sword as a gift.

[Bogmeister]

_Rock Hudson - " Ice Station Zebra " Trailer - 1968

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________________ Directed by John Sturges

A spy thriller based on a novel by Alistair Maclean.

Rock Hudson stars as a nuclear submarine captain who, in a secret meeting with an admiral (Lloyd Nolan), is ordered to head with his sub to the Arctic, where he ostensibly is to rescue members of a scientific research team, quartered at the code-named Ice Station Zebra.

But the real mission is to retrieve film, taken by a new camera in orbit, which had fallen somewhere in that Arctic region due to a malfunction. To facilitate the success of this mission, the sub is also boarded by a secret agent (Patrick McGoohan) and a Soviet defector (Ernest Borgnine).

In charge of the marines on board is the tough, no-nonsense Capt. Anders (Jim Brown); Tony Bill plays a 1st Lieutenant.

Of course, in a story such as this, not everyone is who he seems to be.

_________________ Ice Station Zebra Begining


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Before the sub reaches its destination, it becomes apparent that there's a saboteur aboard. This was very much like a James Bond adventure without James Bond.

McGoohan as the mysterious spy on board fills those shoes to some extent, but the real cool thing about his role is that this is McGoohan's follow-up to his TV secret agents, Danger Man and The Prisoner — as if one of those characters were plugged into a big budget movie.

It's not as exciting as a typical Bond film, having more to do with routine spy intrigue than action, but the final act has a lot of tension, especially when the Soviet soldiers arrive.

Also, the entire feel of the locale after they reach the Arctic has this sci-fi tone to it — as if the protagonists are dealing with their situation on another planet. It also has the feel of a studio set to me, but that couldn't be helped.

BoG's Score: 6.2 out of 10

___________________ Ice Station zebra Dive


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Trivia From the Ice Station: Sturges also directed a previous Alistair MacLean adaptation — The Satan Bug (65);

~ McGoohan was still filming episodes of The Prisoner when he played his role here; as a result, he had one episode of his series rewritten so that he didn't have to appear.

~ At one point, Gregory Peck & David Niven were planned to star in the roles of Hudson and McGoohan, sort of like a reprise of their roles in The Guns of Navarone (61).

~ Charlton Heston was also offered Hudson's role, but declined it.

~ The film was a box office hit and revitalized Hudson's flagging career. Footage from this film was used in later films such as Grey Lady Down (7 and Never Say Never Again (83).

_____ ROCK HUDSON - ICE STATION ZEBRA - 1968


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BoG
Galaxy Overlord Galactus

[Bud Brewster]

The Mystery Andrew Bogdan!

The above post by the late Andrew Bogdan is one I somehow overlooked when I rescued 500 of his post from his own sci-fi forum, The Galactic Base of Science Fiction <—link, by posting copies of his movie reviews here on All Sci-Fi.

Andrew (aka Bogmeister) maintained his own message board for five years (2010 - 2015), and he added 3,267 posts, many of which are like the one above.

And yet, from 2009 until 2015, Andrew was also my co-site administrator here on All Sci-Fi, and he was both my friend and an invaluable asset to the board. In fact, he's the one who actually invented the first of our Alphabetical and Chronological Indexes!

However, for reasons I still don't understand, he never mentioned his own struggling message board to me or anyone else here on ASF! For God's sake, why didn't he invite us to join?

Adding to this mystery is the fact that I didn't discover the existence of his board until several years after he passed away!



Andrew's reason for never sharing his board with ASF members remains a baffling mystery.

Sadly, during those five years while he struggled alone to keep his board alive, he only managed to attract 15 registers users — and they only contributed 7 posts.

Furthermore, after Andrew died in 2017, new members could no longer join — simply because Andrew could no longer activate their memberships.

And yet, to this day The Galactic Base of Science Fiction still gets visitors! At the bottom of the main index is this statement.

Most users ever online was 309 on Sat Jul 03, 2021.

Amazing . . .
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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IMDB has 55 trivia items for this movie. Here’s a few of the ones I found the most interesting, in the blue text.
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~ In the era before VCRs, Howard Hughes would call the Las Vegas TV station he owned and demand they run this particular movie. Hughes so loved this film that it aired on his Las Vegas station over 100 times during his lifetime.

Note from me: Hey, that's what All Sci-Fi needs! Our own TV station so that you guys can PM me with movies requests, along with when you want you selection shown. (Please include date and time, with you time zone).

I'll work out a schedule and post it on the boards, and all the folks who want to share the experience can meet in All Sci-Fi's Chatzy room!

~ Unique and innovative underwater camera equipment was developed for this movie by 2nd unit cameraman and cinematographer 'John M Stephens', a former U.S.A. Navy diver, who is billed in the credits for additional arctic photography.

The camera system enabled the first ever filming of a continuous submarine dive and this technical innovation produced some outstanding photography for the picture. This achievement was encapsulated in an accompanying MGM short promo film The Man Who Makes the Difference (1968) which is available on the DVD for this movie.

Note from me: And by gum, here it is!

_____ The Man Who Makes the Difference (1968)


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~ In one scene Patrick McGoohan was supposed to dive into the flooded torpedo room of the nuclear sub to rescue a trapped naval officer.

Being a strong swimmer, he insisted on doing the scene himself rather than use a stuntman. A change was made to the script so allowing Olympic swimming champion Murray Rose, who'd been cast in another role, to do the scene with him in case anything happened.

It was only after the scene was completed that Rose revealed that whilst he and McGoohan were standing up to their necks in the rising water just before the cameras rolled, Pat had whispered to him "Now I've done it, my foot's stuck". Rose dived down and freed his foot which had become wedged tight in the torpedo rack.

Note from me: Can't you just hear McGoohan saying that in his wonderful British accent?





~ Rock Hudson said this was his personal favorite film.

Note from me: I guess part of the reason for Rock's high opinion is the fact that his character is so macho. If is so, that's kinda ironic, ain't it?

~ The movie's plot has similarities with the real life 1962 CIA Project COLDFEET aka Operation Coldfeet. Conducted in May and June of that year, the assignment purpose was to gather intelligence from an abandoned Soviet arctic research ice station.

Two agents parachuted from a B-17 Flying Fortress and searched the facility and were collected three days later via the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system.

Note from me: If it was abandoned by the Russians it seems unlikely there was anything of value left behind.

~ The film's story has similarities with the real life events, reported in the media in April 1959, of the Discoverer II experimental Corona satellite capsule that went missing and was recovered by Soviet intelligence agents after it crashed near Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean.

Note from me: Read about the Project Corona here. It was actually very similar to the concept presented in Ice Station Zebra.

Project Corona: America's first photo reconnaissance satellite

~ The production began with shooting the film in Ultra Panavision (2.76), but soon switched to Super Panavision (2.21). This can be seen in the shots of the Lear jet near the start of the film. The engine intakes which are round have a slight oval shape. This is because the Ultra Panavision was scaled down horizontally to match the Super Panavision aspect ratio.

Note from me: It seems odd that they didn't just crop the ends off the wider image, rather than distort the full Ultra Panavision image to the size of the Super Panavision image to make it fit.

I can always tell when an image on TV has been squeezed or stretched, even slightly. It drives me crazy.

~ To do the orbital plane change from an equatorial to a polar orbit described by Jones (Patrick McGoohan) would require an enormous amount of fuel, certainly more fuel than could ever be carried on a practical satellite. Even the tiny orbital plane changes carried out during the Gemini and Apollo programs were extremely costly in fuel, and mission planning always sought to minimize the necessity of such maneuvers.





Note from me: Boy, those science fiction writers always cheat a little, don't they? Gosh, I NEVER do that . . . much.

~ In early casting news for Ice Station Zebra (1968), Peck was announced to play the submarine Commander James Ferraday (played by Rock Hudson), while Niven was going to be the British agent David Jones (played by Patrick McGoohan).

Note from me: I can sort of see those two in the roles played by Hudson and McGoohah . . . but I'm glad the casting change was made.

~ When they are waiting for the approaching planes, the first shot is of 5 MIGs in a V, then they become 4 MIGs in a right echelon and then back to a V, but they are F-4 Phantoms in a V.

Note from me: The unimpressive special effects of the miniature MIGs is a distraction for folks who love fine FX and dislike sloppy ones. Those scenes are good examples of why I feel like CGI is capable of doing scenes like those much better — even when it's the kind that some folks might call "poorly done CGI".

The problem here is that it was so painfully obvious the miniatures were anchor to a piece of glass in front the typically shaky aerial photography which bounced around, while the planes were rock steady!





Thankfully the underwater scenes were done to perfection!





I was inspired by this idea of a submarine going through an "ice canyon" when I wrote Sail the Sea of Stars in the early 1980s, so I took my starship, the G.S.C. Candlelight down into a canyon on a barren planet to shield it from a bizarre hurricane-like storm on the surface.





~ In an interview, given in 1990 to french student Michael Laborie, director John Sturges said that he did not like Michel Legrand's music for this movie.

Note from me: Hmmm . . . I actually like it quite lot. Different strokes for different folks, I reckon.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)