ICE STATION ZEBRA: You’ve Already Guessed That I’m Some Sort of Sneaky Bastard

Ice Station Zebra (1968) – Directed by John Sturges – Starring Rock Hudson, Patrick McGoohan, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, and Alf Kjellin.

It takes 90 minutes for ICE STATION ZEBRA to get to Ice Station Zebra.

I’m not saying that this is a negative, but I can’t imagine this film, if made today, would be 2 1/2 hours long or that it would take 1 1/2 of those hours to get to the location where the primary action occurs. What’s truly amazing about ZEBRA, though, isn’t the time aspect in and of itself, but the time aspect considering there’s only three primary characters: Commander James Ferraday (Rock Hudson), British spy David Jones (Patrick McGoohan), and Russian spy Boris Vaslov (Ernest Borgnine). Yeah, Jim Brown gets his name and face on the poster, but ZEBRA doesn’t give him much to do, to the point where I decided somewhere in the middle of this movie that one of my next novels is going to feature a character for 1960s Jim Brown to play in the movie adaptation.

So, get on that time machine, scientists.

Much of those first 90 minutes of ZEBRA is dedicated to getting Mr. Jones to Ice Station Zebra, and the bulk of this action takes place on the USS Tigerfish submarine that Ferraday commands. There is a ton of procedural stuff here: “Up this,” “Down that,” “Take us to X depth,” “30 fathoms,” “40 fathoms,” “50 fathoms,” “60 fathoms,” “70 fathoms,” “Yes, Captain,” “No, Captain,” “As you were.” Allegedly, Alfred Hitchcock once said that if you ever get stuck in a movie and don’t know what to do, just show the audience how something works because people love to see behind the scenes. Well, if you’ve ever wanted to know how to operate a nuclear submarine, join the Navy. But if you’ve ever wanted to pretend to know how to operate a nuclear submarine, watch ICE STATION ZEBRA.

All of this sounds like a negative (in total if not in particular), but ZEBRA just works for me. Despite the slow moving plot (and the inclusion of a musical overture to start the film and then a musical interlude during an intermission break), I was hooked right from the start and stayed that way right through the end.

The key to ZEBRA’s success for me is that everyone here is a professional and while they extend professional courtesies to one another, they’ve all got their own jobs to do. It’s striking that while clearly we’re set up to think that Ferraday is the protagonist (he’s introduced first, he’s the captain, and Hudson gets top billing), he’s kept in the dark about certain aspects of the mission. As Jones reminds him at one point, he’s actually in charge of the mission, he just hasn’t stepped on Ferraday’s toes because everything Ferraday’s done has been what Jones wants done. The implication, however, is clear: over the course of those first 90 minutes, Captain Ferraday is, in essence, little more than a bus driver.

ZEBRA constantly cuts Ferraday’s authority off at the knees: Jones doesn’t tell him the whole truth, Vaslov doesn’t tell him the whole truth, and Captain Anders (Brown) doesn’t tell him the whole truth. This makes Ferraday’s ultimate role as hero in the film’s final encounter with the Russians hit with greater impact because he gets to rise to the front of the film.

John Sturges is an excellent director in terms of keeping the story moving, but his camera placement deserves a bit of a discussion. With so much of the film taking place in the cramped quarters of a submarine (especially considering all of the U.S. Marines that are being transported alongside the normal crew), Sturges largely keeps the camera at a distance. It’s as if most scene are shot from the room’s far corner or opposing wall from the action. At least while the action is taking place on the sub, it almost feels like a mult-camera sitcom in that we, as viewers, spend the entire time sitting behind the fourth wall. It would be the easy decision to get the cameras in everyone’s face as much as possible because it would help to raise the dramatic tension, but by keeping the camera back we get to see more of the operations, and we get to feel Ferraday’s sense of not knowing who these people are that have come aboard his ship. Sturges and Cinematographer Daniel Fapp use their camera to make us feel what Ferraday must be feeling – Jones, Vaslov, and Anders are all unknown quantities to him who keep themselves at a distance from him.

Similarly to The Guns of Navarone (another movie based on an Alistair MacLean novel), the main character is professional, capable, and a bit boring. Just as the real star performance in Navarone is given by Anthony Quinn, in ZEBRA it’s Patrick McGoohan who gives the film its primary charge. McGoohan is fantastic. His quick, vocal delivery and quietly hawkish manner are more interesting to me than any of the decent action sequences. In fact, when we finally get a big action scene on the sub, I’m almost bored by it. I’d rather just watch these characters talk and interact with one another. Maybe one of the reasons why I like ZEBRA so much despite the length is that it’s very Tarrantino-esque in terms of being dialogue driven. There’s no heated, pop culture argument about Kirby’s Silver Surfer vs. Moebius’ Silver Surfer, but this is a very character-driven piece.

What is fascinating to me (and since this is the second MacLean-based film in which this is true, it must be at least partly because of MacLean) is that ZEBRA character-driven without being intimate. We don’t know about these characters’ personal lives or watch them fall into a military-induced bromance – these are just professional men doing professional work, and figuring out who they are, what makes them tick, and what their ultimate purpose is for being in the narrative makes them interesting. It gives a far greater emphasis on the characters’ actions, so when Vaslov spends an extra tick looking at a piece of the sub’s machinery or when Jones is startled awake and he jumps up with a gun in his hand, it has a far greater impact because we don’t know who these men really are. The puzzle pieces, as it were, take on greater importance because we have so few pieces and no idea what the overall puzzle is going to look like in totality.

ICE STATION ZEBRA isn’t a movie I’m going to watch over and over again. I think the film’s weaknesses would become increasingly evident with repeated viewings, and a decent action scene like some men falling through the ice would start to feel pointless because they’re not included to further the plot as much as to make sure the film doesn’t go too long without something happening other than dudes talking to one another inside a cramped room.

I do like this movie, though, and I like it quite a bit. While the action isn’t as good as in Guns of Navarone, I like the story and characters in ZEBRA better. Even little things like the way ZEBRA continually favors a blue and white color palette strikes the right chord with me. I wish the film had given Jim Brown more to do and I wish to God (and I’m not even religious) that Ernest Borgnine’s cartoonish Russian accent had been given less to do, but McGoohan’s performance more than makes up for any of the film’s weaker moments.

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Mark Bousquet is the author of several novels, including Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, andAdventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitle Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.

THE WILD BUNCH: Egg-Sucking, Chicken-Stealing Gutter Trash

The Wild Bunch (1969) – Directed by Sam Peckinpah – Starring William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Edmond O’Brien, Jaime Sánchez, and Strother Martin.

Do you live life for yourself or for others?

That question lies at the heart of Sam Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH, a fantastically violent movie about masculine relationships. There are actual brothers, like Lyle and Tector Gorch (Warren Oates and Ben Johnson), spiritual brothers like Pike Bishop and Dutch Engstrom (William Holden and Ernest Borgnine), and disenfranchised brothers like Bishop and his old running mate-in-crime, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan). It’s the fifth member of the Bunch, Angel (Jaime Sánchez), who doesn’t have a matching brother, but is treated like the youngest sibling by the group: Pike is the father who keeps him in line, Duke is the mother who watches over him, and Lyle and Tector are the older brothers who make his life miserable. The whole unit operates on this principle, but with the intensity of a wolfpack always jockeying for their place in the group.

Heck, Peckinpah even gives them a crazy uncle in Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), an old-timer who used to be a more active member of Pike’s gang.

Women are all but inconsequential in THE WILD BUNCH as characters. They’re either mothers, whores, or potential mothering whores. In the opening gunfight, women in the street are caught between Bishop’s group robbing the bank and Deke Thornton’s group of mercenaries hired by the railroad company to stop Pike, and they’re gunned down without thought or consequence. Both sides either fire into women or use them as shields; they are treated no different than the men milling about the street. Women do allow us to see something about the individual men; Angel is betrayed by his former love, who has left behind their village to ensconce herself with the Federales. When Angel sees his lover in the arms of the much older and, to Angel, politically repugnant General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), he rises up from his table and shoots her. Mapache and his army goons are instantly rifles-up, but Pike calms them by telling the general that Angel wasn’t shooting at him, but the woman.

Mapache’s response? He laughs and arrests Angel instead of immediately killing him and the rest of the Bunch.

Of course, it should be noted that Pike’s group doesn’t continually refer to themselves as “the Wild Bunch,” a popular tag for outlaws in the Old West. Of course #2, we’re not really in the Old West anymore, as we’re in the middle of the Mexican Revolution, and pre-World War I. Peckinpah taps into that sense of loss that’s so popular among Western filmmakers, with the run into Mexico also doubling as a run to the lawlessness of the Old West.

It’s also possible to apply the “wild bunch” moniker to Deke’s mercenaries; Pike’s group is just more “bunch” and Deke’s mercs are more “wild.” Deke makes it clear to the railroad man in charge of getting him out of jail that these guns for hire are not capable of tracking and taking down Pike’s group, and that he needs real men to do the job. At each insistence, Harrigan (Albert Dekker), the railroad exec rebuffs him, telling him he’s got 30 days to bring in Pike or it’s back to Yuma for him. In the post-opening gunfight confrontation between these two men, Thornton lets him have it, accusing him of hiding behind the law, which gives him the legal justification to be in the right. Deke thunders at him: “Tell me, Mr. Harrigan…how does it feel, getting paid for it? How does it feel to sit back and hire your killin’, with the law’s arms around you? How does it feel to be so god damn right?”

Harrigan’s response is one word: “Good.”

“You dirty son of a bitch!”

“You’ve got thirty days to get Pike, or thirty days back to Yuma. You’re my Judas goat, Mr. Thornton. I want all of them back here, head down over a saddle.”

Thornton is a wonderful character and Robert Ryan delivers the film’s best performance, giving us a Thornton caught between working for the railroad to capture/kill his old partner and not working for the railroad and going back to jail in Yuma, where we see in a brief flashback that Deke is tortured. Peckinpah resists easy solutions for his characters in WILD BUNCH and Deke does the job because his motivation for staying free is stronger than his motivation for going back to prison. He doesn’t want to kill Pike, as we see in that initial gunfight when he was Pike sighted and doesn’t pull the trigger – something Harrigan sees and uses to keep Deke motivated – but if this is what he has to do to get his freedom back, this is what he’s going to do.

We see in another flashback that Deke was the cautious partner to Pike’s “live in the moment” counterpart, but Deke isn’t driven by revenge; instead, he simply laments what has come to pass, even ripping into his bounty hunters at one point with this thunderous admonition: “You think Pike and old Sykes haven’t been watchin’ us? They know what this is all about – and what do I have? Nothin’ but you egg-suckin’, chicken-stealing gutter trash, with not even sixty rounds between you. We’re after men, and I wish to God I was with them. The next time you make a mistake, I’m gonna ride off and let you die.”

Peckinpah uses dialogue in such a way that it’s like a bonus gunfight, punctuating his quiet scenes with red-hot lines that speak mostly to the meaning of manhood. When the Bunch is tense after Sykes leads their horses tumbling down a sand dune, Pike gets right in their faces: “We’re not gonna get rid of anybody. We’re gonna stick together, just like it used to be. When you side with a man, you stay with him. And if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal – you’re finished! We’re finished! All of us!”

After Angel shoots his ex-lover, Pike agrees to go to work for Mapache and steal a U.S. army train of its weapons and ammunition. They pull off the theft in quiet at a refueling station, with Thornton’s bounty hunters and a group of Army soldiers that look so young they should be in Boy Scouts instead of fighting for Uncle Sam down on the border. It’s a fantastic sequence, proving that Peckinpah knows ACTION, not just VIOLENCE. They get the drop on the workers and soldiers at the front of the train, Angel disconnects the cars, and then they pull away with the booty in hand. Deke figures it out just a bit too late, and his group are off after the train, but they’re horses are no match for the power of iron and steam. When they get to the pre-arranged meeting point, they unload the train and then send it hurtling back towards Deke and the army. When Deke’s men eventually catch up to them, Pike has Angel rig a bridge to blow, which it does with Deke’s men and their horses right in the middle of it. It’s a great scene, made even better by Pike’s knowing tip of his hat toward Deke right before it blows.

Pike understands the situation they both find themselves in, but Dutch doesn’t. When he laments about what Deke is doing, Pike tells him that Deke gave his word. “To the railroad!” Dutch exclaims. “It’s his word,” Pike insists. “That ain’t what counts!” Dutch argues back. “It’s who you give it to!”

THE WILD BUNCH is a story of bad men being chased by even worse men; one side are criminals, the other side is bounty hunters, but there’s not a white hat among them. Peckinpah uses the bounty hunters to allow us to see the better aspects of Pike’s men, and while Peckinpah never turns them into heroes, though he does let them die with a bit of honor.

When they deliver the guns, Mapache knows that Angel stole one of the cases to give to his pro-Revolution village (his share for participating) and captures him for a second time. Angel went in with Dutch, and the older criminal is forced to watch as Mapache’s men take Angel. Borgnine’s acting here is understated and phenomenal; without saying anything you can see that he doesn’t want to leave Angel here, but also that he knows there’s nothing he can do. “I guess I better get going,” he says nervously. “And Angel?” the Mexicans ask him. “If he pulls his gun, he dies, and so Dutch keeps his gun holstered. “He’s a thief,” he answers with clear misgiving. “Let the general handle him,” he finishes and rides off. When he gets back to the Bunch, however, he’s pouty about leaving Angel behind. Thornton’s men shoot Sykes and Pike realizes they’re in a bad spot with their water running out. They decide to go back to Mapache’s compound for safety. When they get there they see Mapache dragging Angel behind his car, as everyone revels in the treatment of the would-be Revolutionary, and Pike tries to buy him back, but Mapache dismisses the idea by telling Pike he’s already got guns and he doesn’t need gold.

The Bunch is encouraged to partake of the wine and women, and the four remaining men slink off. We cut to the next morning to find all of them in a foul mood at their situation. Dutch is sitting outside, whittling some wood and looking miserable. Lyle and Tector are arguing with a whore over her payment, and Pike is dressing after a night with his young whore. He hears her baby crying and you can see all of Pike’s bad choices coalesce in Holden’s face at that moment. He pays her a few extra pieces of gold, then goes to the next room to collect Lyle and Tec. “Let’s go,” he says, standing in the doorway. The brothers know what he means and know what the price will likely be; they accept anyway. “Why the hell not?” Lyle responds, and they go to collect Dutch.

The four men walk through town in one of those Western money shots with the bad-asses strolling purposefully with their guns in hand. They demand Angel’s return; Mapache gives him to them, but then slices Angel’s throat. The Bunch instantly kills the general and the ultimate quiet-before-the-storm moment descends as the Federales don’t know what to do. The Bunch starts grinning, happier about the kill than angered at Mapache’s death, but the Mexicans are brought back to life when Pike shoots and kills one of Mapache’s German military advisors.

Violence erupts in a bloody, visceral final act. A machine gun gets used several times and Peckinpah lets the shooting and killing play out for several long minutes. Characters are shot multiple times and a whole horde of nameless Mexican soldiers are slaughtered by machine gun. At the end, though, all four remaining members of the Bunch are killed. It’s really the only honest end to the film; earlier Pike had told Dutch he wanted to make on final score and then back off.

“Back off to what?” Dutch asks him, knowing full well there’s nothing for them to back off to. They’re committed to this lifestyle, reveling in it on good days and trapped by it on bad ones. At another point, Pike tells them they have to “start thinking ahead of their guns” because this life can’t last forever.

THE WILD BUNCH has rightfully earned its designation as a cinematic classic. Peckinpah expertly balances violence and the consequence of violence. When Deke and the bounty hunters arrive to find everybody dead, he takes no joy in his not-quite-earned freedom, allowing his mercs to take the bodies back to Harrington to collect their money. (They don’t make it.) Sitting against the wall and looking depressed, Deke is greeted by Sykes, who’s gunshot wound from Deke’s men proved not to be fatal. Sykes is riding with a new gang, and offers Deke a place. “Me and the boys got some work to do,” he tells his old mate. “You want to come with us? It ain’t like it used to be; but it’ll do.”

Deke accepts and Robert Ryan’s face tells us all we need to know: Of course he accepts. What else is there for an aging gunfighter to do?

HANNIE CAULDER: There Aren’t Any Hard Women … Only Soft Men

Hannie Caulder (1971) – Directed by Burt Kennedy – Starring Raquel Welch, Robert Culp, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, Strother Martin, Christopher Lee, and Stephen Boyd.

We’re kicking off Western Month here at the Anxiety with a look at the surprisingly engaging HANNIE CAULDER, an early ’70s, slightly feminist western that succeeds largely because of the movie’s long second act and the chemistry between Hannie (Raquel Welch) and bounty hunter Thomas Price (Robert Culp).

CAULDER tells the story of Hannie’s rise from frontier wife to killer, but the movie is at its best not when it’s a revenge flick but when it’s about Thomas teaching Hannie how to be a gunslinger so she can enact revenge on the the Clemens brothers (Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin, and Jack Elam) who killed her husband, raped her, burned her house down, and left her behind that CAULDER becomes noteworthy.

Not that Raquel Welch in anything in 1971 isn’t noteworthy, but despite what you might think from that movie poster up at the top of this review, or the publicity stills produced for the film, the film does surprisingly little sexualizing of Welch. In a sense, of course, you don’t have to make and effort to highlight Welch’s sexuality because it’s always present but the film offers only a few moments where it’s showing that off, and none of it remotely close to that suggestive pose on the film’s poster, which sees Hannie posing with her three rapists. Instead, the film largely keeps Welch covered up after she acquires some pants, which makes the occasional glimpse of her bare stomach beneath her poncho or her bare arms resonate even stronger than the gratuitous shot of her bare back and wet pants rising up out of a bath tub.

The movie opens with the Clemens brothers robbing a bank. One of the bank tellers sounds the alarm and the Clemenses have to shoot their way out of town. They head into the desert with the Federales on their tail, and then stop at a house with a bunch of horses inside a large pen. They shoot the man who comes out to tell them to move along after they’ve watered their horses, and then go inside and rape Hannie, the man’s wife. The film plays fast and loose with the plot – somehow the Clemenses (who provide the comic relief in a film that doesn’t really need any comic relief) have managed to evade the Federales long enough to spend the night taking turns with Hannie, and then decide to burn her house down, regardless of the fact that burning buildings tend to draw attention more than not, yet later when the film needs the pace to pick up, the Federales are right back on their tail.

And then they disappear, never to be seen again.

After the Clemenses are gone and Hannie is still in shock, bounty hunter Thomas Price rides up to get some water for him and his two horses. Hannie points a shotgun at him, and his disarms her. When he turns his back on her, she clocks him and knocks him out, but then covers him with a blanket near a fire, sitting nearby, still shell-shocked from her experience.

When Price wakes up she tells him she needs his help, but he refuses, gets on his horse, and leaves her behind.

Except she doesn’t accept his refusal, and dressed in only a poncho she stumbles along after him. He gives her a hat and pants, but still refuses to help. It’s only when he watches her have a nightmare about the rape that his position softens, and he takes her to Mexico to meet with his pal/gunmaker Bailey (Christopher Lee) to get him to build a gun specifically for her. Welch does a truly great job going from scared housewife to killer over the course of the film.

It’s in Mexico that the film really shines as we see Thomas soften, Hannie harden post-rape, and Bailey (an excellent Christopher Lee) and his children in between them. There’s a pair of mirrored scenes where each watches the other with Bailey’s children, and the space between these scenes are largely filled with Thomas training Hannie how to shoot. Bailey can see that the two of them would be good for each other. “Fine looking woman,” he says to Thomas from his porch. “She wants to be a man,” Thomas replies. “She’ll never make it,” Bailey declares.

Bailey gets another great line when he presents his specially made gun to Hannie: “Reason I take such pains with the outside of a gun is because I always thought death very unattractive … least I can do is add a bit of style.”

Robert Culp is fantastic. If Robert Redford and Peter Fonda had a baby, it would grow up to look like Robert Culp in HANNIE CAULDER. Thomas has that calm attitude, like no matter how crazy the rest of the world gets, his center is solid and ready for anything. Except, maybe, falling for Hannie. Culp is very under-stated in CAULDER and he’s so cool, so ready for anything that it does come as a shock when he dies after getting a knife in the gut from Ernest Borgnine.

It’s telling that Hannie doesn’t become a killer until after Thomas dies. When he’s alive, it doesn’t matter what Hannie does because he will always be better than she is with a gun. After Thomas dies, however, it’s like his spirit takes hold of Hannie and she sets out to kill the three Clemenses. When she collects the Dead or Alive reward she uses Thomas’ words, and she constantly hears him in her head when she’s readying to shoot someone.

Thomas’ death was something I hadn’t seen coming. Because the film spends so much time with Thomas and Hannie’s domestic fantasies, I really didn’t see Thomas dying – and especially not with 30 minutes to go – but it finally hardens Hannie to what she’s chosen to do, and from that moment on she’s focused on killing the Clemenses.

HANNIE CAULDER certainly isn’t an all-time great western, but it is a darn fine film thanks to the performances and chemistry between Welch and Culp, and well worth a watch if the film has escaped your attention. “You’re a hard woman,” the town sheriff tells Hannie. “There aren’t any hard women,” she replies, “only soft men.” It’s a nice line but it’s not the truth, as Hannie herself proves to us by the end of the film.