Bear Island [1979]

Product Information

Badet naken på Bjørnøya ("Swam naked on Bear island")". 2008. Archived from the original on December 27, 2014 . Retrieved September 5, 2008. His wife Lesley was a sailor and author in her own right, becoming Northern Ireland’s first female yacht club commodore. Hughes, Dorothy B. (5 December 1971). "MacLean Writes as Man of the Sea". Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif. p.z72.

List of coastal radio stations" (PDF). World Meteorological Organisation. 2005 . Retrieved October 9, 2006. [ dead link] Publications of administrative and general interest are issued by the Governor of Svalbard [1]. Maps, research reports, and scholarly works about Svalbard-related subjects are available from the Norwegian Polar Institute [2].

Rate And Review

In some ways, I think the rather cold reception "Bear Island" had when it debuted was because author Alistair MacLean set the bar so high with previous film adaptations of his novels. This is the same guy who brought us "The Guns of Navarone", "The Satan Bug" and "Where Eagles Dare"...so I really think people expected a bit too much from "Bear Island". After all, it's a pretty good film but not nearly in the same class as these other movies. The whole island was privately owned by the coal mining company of Bjørnøen AS from 1918 to 1932, when the Norwegian state took over the shares. Bjørnøen AS now exists as a state-owned company, and it is jointly managed with Kings Bay AS, the company that runs the operations of Ny-Ålesund on Spitsbergen. [6] A Norwegian radio station ( Bjørnøya Radio, callsign: LJB [7]) was established in Herwighamna on the northern coast in 1919. It was later extended to include a meteorological station. Buch, Cato (2002). "Snøhvit: Reasons for Bellona's opposition". Archived from the original on February 10, 2006 . Retrieved October 18, 2005. Bear Island" was written in 1971, and is probably the last decent book he wrote. The plot is intriguing, with some genuinely original twists, and the Arctic setting does provide for some interestingly claustrophobic suspense. The characters are stereotypes and the dialogue is at best flat and at worst atrocious, but the story does move until the climax, where it suddenly wraps up conveniently in a revelation scene Hercule Poirot would have been proud of. It's most interesting feature is that it is about a film shoot, and allows MacLean the opportunity to take potshots at an industry he both detested and depended on. (When "Bear Island" was filmed, the screenwriters jettisoned the film shoot completely and made a completely different movie than what MacLean had written.) Also of interest is the amount of alcohol all the characters consume throughout the story; MacLean's own demon seems to be taking over his story telling. Kilday, Gregg (11 December 1978). "FILM CLIPS: Is O'Neal Set to 'Suffer or Die'?". Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, California. p.f21.

The landscape is incredibly beautiful: infinitely vast, impregnable, and actually quite inhospitable. I love the feeling of being small and experience a deep sense of humility and love for this unrivaled nature. It's a hard-to-beat place." I was 12 years old when I went to see this film in our local cinema on a Saturday afternoon. I went to see it because what I saw in the trailer really appealed to me and the film lived up to my expectations completely. I was the only person in the whole theatre so it's pretty obvious that the film wasn't popular, but I don't know why this should be. We did solo watches: two hours behind the wheel, eight hours off. We would arrive at Bear Island very well rested. Plastic on Bear Island Director Don Sharp, as Ken Annakin noted in his memoirs, was better at derring-do than humour, but nobody goes to MacLean for a laugh: here too he is unlike Fleming, whose pawky vein of wit was broadened by the Bond scenarists and has preserved the early 007 entries magnificently. The solemnity of "Bear Island"'s furry, flailing personnel becomes risible.Archived copy" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 4 March 2016 . Retrieved 13 October 2015. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title ( link) The island's outline is an approximate triangle pointing south with a greatest north-south extension of 20 kilometres (12mi) and a greatest east-west extension of 9 + 3⁄ 4mi). Its surface area is 178 square kilometres (69sqmi). The southern part of Bjørnøya is mountainous, the highest top being Miseryfjellet on the southeast coast at about 536 metres (1,759ft) above sea level.

This book was a total mixed bag for me. There were some things I liked, and there were a lot of things I couldn't stand. I'll start with the things I liked. Sharp decided to change the film crew in the novel to a scientific unit. "I don't think you can make films about film units," he later said adding "I think possibly we tried to put too much meaning and too much cast into an action adventure story. I think if we cut some of the character interaction and just played it for speed and thrills it might have made more money." [8] Other changes from the novel included altering the characters, and arriving at the island earlier. [9] Snell said MacLean was supportive of the changes. [2] Budget [ edit ] One thing Mattias often feels when working in extreme environments, including Svalbard, is that these places are not really meant for humans.If you want an action movie MacLean is not for you as he is the Master of Suspense and writes in a way to keep you on the edge of your seat wondering what is going on. If you see this from the middle, you will be bored, you must see it from the start and watch with full attention. If you miss any of the plot, you will get confused frustrated and wonder why you're watching the movie. American academic Frank Lansing (Donald Sutherland) joins a group of international scientists researching climate change on the remote and icy Bear Island, located between Norway and the Arctic Circle in the Barents Sea. The expedition leader is German Otto Geran (Richard Widmark), and the other scientists include Norway's Heddi Lindquist (Vanessa Redgrave), Poland's Lechinski (Christopher Lee), American Smithy (Lloyd Bridges) and Canada's Judith Rubin (Barbara Parkins). I've had 'Bear Island' in my personal library all this time and decided to read it. Although I admire MacLean's success as a writer, this book for me was a disappointment. I remember when the movie came out in 1979. It had an all-star cast and I liked it, despite it not doing well in the box office. Sadly, the book was not as good or even close to better than the movie. It's written in the first-person narrative (his last in this style, I believe). Although MacLean's writing is tongue-in-cheek and contains snappy dialogue, the book is slow and quite boring at times. I only finished reading it because I dislike not finishing a book once I begin reading it. Makes for bad habits. Adilman, Sid (30 December 1985). "Worst Canadian performers of the year award". Toronto Star. Toronto, Ontario. p.D1. Gwynn, J.P.; Dowdall, M.; Lind, B. (2004). "The Radiological Environment of Svalbard" (PDF). National Institute Polar Research Memoirs. Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority. 23 (2): 167. Bibcode: 2004PolRe..23..167G. doi: 10.1111/j.1751-8369.2004.tb00006.x. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 3, 2016 . Retrieved February 10, 2011.

Bear Island has a manned met-station in the North. Everything else is wilderness. Credit: Jon Amtrup Norwegian government agencies have conducted hydrographic surveys of Svalbard waters throughout the 20th century. The responsibility fell to the Norges Svalbard- og Ishavsundersøkelser in 1928, its successor, the Norwegian Polar Institute from 1948, and the Norwegian Hydrographic Service from 1984. [14] Land surveying and mapping are the responsibilities of the Polar Institute.Although there are currently no industrial activities on Bjørnøya or in its immediate vicinity, pollution by toxic and radioactive substances remains a threat to the island's virtually untouched nature. Exploration in the Barents sea and the recent development of the Snøhvit gas field off the northern coast of Norway shows that the ecologically sensitive polar and subpolar sea areas of the Norwegian and Barents Sea have come into the focus of the petrol and gas industry. [22] The environmental organisation Bellona has criticised [23] the Norwegian government for licensing these activities without sufficient studies of their ecological impact. Organic toxins, specifically PCBs, have been found in high concentrations in biological samples from Bear Island, especially in Arctic char of the freshwater lake Ellasjøen. [24] The Soviet nuclear submarine Komsomolets sank on 7 April 1989, some 135 nautical miles (250km) southwest of Bear Island. [25] Leakage of radioactive material from the reactor and nuclear warheads currently poses a problem [ citation needed], and severe pollution of the surrounding waters remains possible. [26] [ failed verification] Culture [ edit ] a b c Plommer, Leslie (30 March 1979). "Canada among the victims in the big Canadian films". The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ontario. p.13. But that being said, there was a lot that didn't sit well with me, and it's not just because of the book's age (it was written in 1971).