grantss
North Africa, WW2. Four British medical staff - a medical unit CO, the unit's sergeant major and two female nurses - are separated from their unit while trying to evacuate from besieged Tobruk in an ambulance. Along the way they pick up a South African infantry officer. With the Germans taking capturing most of their intended escape destinations, their options are few, and fraught with danger. Plus, the South African officer doesn't appear to be who he claims.Great movie, directed by L Lee Thompson, who went on to direct Cape Fear and The Guns Of Navarone, amongst others. At its most basic it's a pure survival movie - a handful of people in a rickety old truck against the desert. The resourcefulness they show is very interesting and engaging.Add in the fact that there's a war on, and the story adds another level of drama and danger. Then throw in the intrigue that one of the band is potentially a spy and things get really interesting.Good work all round from the main cast - John Mills, Sylvia Syms, Harry Andrews and Anthony Quayle. On the negative side, Thompson's direction is a bit clumsy at times. Some sequences just don't make sense, and overstate the importance of a remark or event. The problem probably lies with the editing, more than anything else.
Leofwine_draca
ICE COLD IN ALEX is, I suppose, the granddaddy of those 'desert war' films that were all the rage in Italy and beyond during the 1960s. This one's a surprisingly low key effort - and all the better for it - that focuses on the efforts of the crew of a first aid truck as it attempts to cross the barren deserts of North Africa to safety.Along the way, the crew members have to contend with Nazi patrols and in-fighting, but their biggest obstacle is the terrain itself. The desert landscapes are brought to full and hostile life in this film as in few others, and watching the crew work together in an attempt to overcome them makes for a suspense-filled journey.John Mills is an obvious and dependable choice as the stalwart lead, but it's Anthony Quayle who steals the show as the South African tagging along for the ride. Harry Andrews plays it just right in support, and even Sylvia Sims contributes an important part instead of feeling extraneous. Watch out for Diane Clare (THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES), Richard Marner ('ALLO 'ALLO) and Walter Gotell in support. This exemplary film was an early feather in the cap for director J. Lee Thompson, a man who would end his career some thirty years later by making Charles Bronson movies for Cannon.
Maddyclassicfilms
Although best known as the film where John Mills orders the most famous drink of beer in history,there is much more to Ice Cold In Alex than that.It's a tense tale of survival against both the odds and nature.Directed by J.Lee Thompson this British classic is based on a true Second World War story of courage and survival by novelist Christopher Landon.Here Landon joins T.J Morrison in writing the tense and gripping screenplay, there's some fine location camera work provided by Gilbert Taylor. The film stars John Mills, Harry Andrews, Sylvia Syms and Anthony Quale.Ice Cold In Alex begins in Tobruk,Africa in 1942,during the height of Rommell's desert campaign. Nervous, boozy Ambulance driver Captain Anson(John Mills)is ordered by his commanding officer to take his ambulance and head East.He's joined by loyal mate MSM Tom Pugh(the often underrated Harry Andrews)and two young nurses Diana Murdoch(Sylvia Syms)and Denise Norton(Diane Clare)who were left stranded when they were fired on during an evacuation attempt at the Harbour.Anson was recently captured by the Germans and escaped,(his escape forced him to walk through the desert for a couple of days without water) and is now reliant on alcohol.When their convoy is attacked the four are alone and he must try and stay sober to find a way of leading them to safety.Things get complicated when they are attacked by Germans and they pick up a stranded African soldier Captain Van Der Poel(Anthony Quale)who they begin to suspect is a German spy.Anson also slowly comes to realise that Diana is falling in love with him.The performances are the highlight here, Mills is perfect as the brave and cynical Anson,slowly snapping under intense pressure and trying to stay off the booze.He's matched well by Quale as the super strong enigmatic Captain Van Der Poel.Highlights include a nail biting walk and drive through a live minefield(which was an improvised sequence by the director),Van Der Poel getting trapped in a swamp and of course that famous ending in the bar.This is without a doubt one of the best survival stories ever filmed.
James Hitchcock
Most British and American war films made during World War II itself are essentially propaganda films, made with the express purpose of keeping up morale and persuading the public to support the war effort. In peacetime, however, filmmakers were able to regard the subject more dispassionately. Certainly, some war films from the late forties, fifties and sixties are simply patriotic adventure stories, but others see the war more in terms of human drama than in terms of "us against them". A good example is "Bridge on the River Kwai" from 1957, which is much more than a simple tale of British heroes versus Japanese villains; the main British character, Colonel Nicholson, is shown as flawed, and his Japanese counterpart, Colonel Saito, is treated surprisingly sympathetically."Ice-Cold in Alex" from the following year takes a similarly dispassionate look at the conflict. It is set in North Africa during the summer of 1942, a time when the campaign was running in favour of the Axis and the Allied armies were in retreat. During the evacuation of Tobruk, a small group become separated from the British forces and are forced to flee cross-country in an ambulance. The group consists of three soldiers, Captain Anson, Sergeant-Major Tom Pugh and South African Captain van der Poel, and two nurses, Diana Murdoch and Denise Norton. The film works on two levels. On one level it is simply an exciting adventure story, narrating the various obstacles and difficulties the group encounter on their way to the safety of the British base at Alexandria- a minefield, a broken suspension spring , the dangerous terrain of the Qattara Depression and German patrols. There are a number of tense sequences, such as the scene in the minefield and the one where the jack collapses and van der Poel uses his immense strength to support the ambulance while Pugh repairs the broken spring. Some of these were reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock, and it is no surprise that J. Lee Thompson was later responsible for the very Hitchcockian thriller "Cape Fear". On another level, however, it is also a complex human drama. Denise is a fairly minor character; she is killed early on when the ambulance is fired upon by German troops. The drama arises from the interaction of the other four in the group, especially Anson and van der Poel. During the war itself, and in many films made after it, British officers were portrayed in the cinema in a straightforward way as stiff-upper-lip heroes. John Mills had played a good example three years earlier in "Above Us the Waves", but Anson is a much more complex character. Badly affected by the stresses of war, he has become an alcoholic. His motivation for carrying on is not patriotism or hatred of the Nazis but the thought of the ice cold lager he will enjoy when they finally reach Alexandria (hence the title). Another motivation is the romance which develops between himself and Diana in the course of their journey. Anson can also be rash and impetuous- he was largely responsible for Denise's death as she was shot while he was trying to outrun a German patrol, having disregarded the German officer's command to halt.During the journey the others, especially Pugh, begin to suspect van der Poel may not be what he seems. (What initially arouses Pugh's suspicion is van der Poel's lack of knowledge of army tea-brewing techniques, tea being a subject dear to any Englishman's heart). The "Afrikaner" van der Poel is eventually revealed to be a German, Otto Lutz, who is attempting to infiltrate the Allied lines on an espionage mission. This leaves Anson, Pugh and Diana with a difficult dilemma; by rights they should hand Otto over to the Military Police to be shot as a spy. On the other hand, they have come to respect a man whose resourcefulness and physical strength have been invaluable in enabling them to survive their trek across the desert. In the end they decide to spare Otto's life by telling the Military Police that he was a German soldier whom they captured after he had become separated from his unit. This means that he will be treated honourably as a prisoner of war, rather than executed as a spy. Even, I think, the most ardent British patriot will recognise that this was the right decision. There is an instructive comparison to be made between "Ice Cold in Alex" and "Sahara", a film from 1943 about the desert war which also concerns a group of Allied soldiers who have captured a German prisoner. In that film the German, von Schletow, is portrayed as a stereotypical Nazi, arrogant, ruthless and treacherous. By 1958, however, the war had been over for more than a decade and West Germany was now a British ally. The Germans could therefore be viewed in a more objective light; Otto is not portrayed simply as "the enemy", or even simply as "a German", but as a human being capable of decency. It is perhaps appropriate that "Ice Cold" was a prizewinner at the Berlin International Film Festival. All four of the main actors- John Mills, Harry Andrews, Anthony Quayle and Sylvia Syms are excellent. Syms was one of the loveliest British actresses of the fifties, although the fact that most of her films were made in Britain rather than Hollywood meant that she never achieved the international fame of contemporaries such as Joan Collins or Jean Simmons. Of her films that I have seen, "Ice Cold" is probably the best. Thompson was later to achieve fame in Hollywood as the director of the likes of "The Guns of Navarone" and "Cape Fear", but he can also be remembered as the director of two of the best British films of the late fifties, both of which starred Mills- this one and "Tiger Bay". 9/10
