Bear Island [1979]

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Also on the island is a bombed out U-Boat facility and supposedly underground passages and caverns where ships may still exist and as we will learn, the possibility of a fortune in gold bars. It doesn't take us long to discover that on board one of the abandoned U-boats is a the stuff to give "Goldfinger' a wet dream - and someone amongst them is determined to secure it. In 2020 HarperCollins Publishers decided to reprint MacLean with fine new covers and a uniform look.Drafted at 19 into the Royal Navy, he worked his way up from Ordinary Seaman to Leading Torpedo Officer while serving in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Far East. The original novel was published in 1971 and became a best-seller, selling over eight million copies.

Aside from that, there wasn’t much inspired about Bear Island, throwing in fist fights and grappling as if it had been sponsored by some wrestling group, and when that palled, adding explosions, swiftly becoming the ideal way of waking up a dozing audience who had been lulled into a soothing state of mind by the lack of any real drama in what was happening. However, due to this movie's disappointing box-office performance, "Goodbye, California", and the other titles were never made by producer Peter Snell, who had bought the rights to numerous MacLean works in 1975, including ones at the time that had not even been published or written yet.Film rights came solely into the hands of the Canadian-born Peter Snell who had lived in England since 1961. MacLean’s world of derring-do simply wasn’t cutting it at the box office anymore, not really his fault, but tastes change and his efforts were a casualty of that shift towards different ways of telling stories and indeed different stories. Bear Island, on loosely based on the great pulp authors work, is a tremendous mix of an action disaster film and a murder mystery. I remember when I was 14 or so going with school friends to see a double bill of Puppet on a Chain and When Eight Bells Toll - it wasn't my choice and I remember them as tedious, but back then I would go to see any old rubbish. This movie was intended as the first in a series of Alistair MacLean adaptations, which would have included "El Dorado", "Athabasca", "Night Without End", and "The Way to Dusty Death".

American scientist Frank Lansing (Donald Sutherland) has come because his father was a U-boat commander who died there, and as accidents start to decimate the expedition he begins to realise that some of his colleagues are after a shipment of gold aboard the U-boat that his father commanded.He had aged considerably and wasn’t the virile action star I had imagined him to be at this point in his film career. We're delighted to be working on an international picture", said second unit director Alan Simmonds.

Richard Widmark ("Otto") heads up a group of scientists on the eponymous island that was formerly used as a Nazi submarine base.

Alistair Stuart MacLean (1922-1987) was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and spent his growing years nearby in Daviot, ten miles south of Inverness. They developed the project for several of months in the mid 1970s but Snell was unable to raise finance. It was the 13th of MacLean’s novels to be turned into a film (though WHERE EAGLES DARE was written as a novel and a screenplay at the same time), beginning with 1961’s THE GUNS OF NAVARONE.