Ice Station Zebra is a 1968 American espionage thriller film directed by John Sturges and starring Rock Hudson, Patrick McGoohan, Ernest Borgnine, and Jim Brown.

[clarification needed] The film concerns a US nuclear submarine that must rush to the North Pole to rescue the members of Ice Station Zebra.

After setting sail, a Kaman SH-2 Seasprite helicopter delivers Captain Anders, a strict officer who takes command of the Marines, and Boris Vaslov, a Russian defector and spy, who Jones trusts.

The submarine sails beneath the thick Arctic pack ice but is unable to break through with its conning tower.

Moments before it is taken, Ferraday activates his own detonator, destroying the film and denying either side the locations of the other's missile silos.

[8] Filming was set to begin in April 1965, but scheduling conflicts and United States Department of Defense objections over Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay because they felt it showed "an unfair distortion of military life" that would "damage the reputation of the Navy and its personnel"[9] delayed the start.

[12] After making four flop comedies in a row, Hudson had been keen to change his image; he had just made Seconds and Tobruk, and Ice Station Zebra was an attempt to continue this.

The fictional nuclear-powered submarine Tigerfish (SSN-509) was portrayed in the movie by the diesel-electric Guppy IIA class sub USS Ronquil (SS-396) when seen on the surface.

George Davis, head of the art department at MGM, spent two years researching interior designs for the submarine.

[3] Second unit cameraman John M. Stephens developed an innovative underwater camera system that successfully filmed the first continuous dive of a submarine, which became the subject of a documentary featurette, The Man Who Makes a Difference.

[21] During filming, Patrick McGoohan had to be rescued from a flooded chamber by a diver who freed his trapped foot, saving his life.

[28] On December 21, 1968, Renata Adler reviewed the film for The New York Times: "a fairly tight, exciting, Saturday night adventure story that suddenly goes all muddy in its crises...

The special effects, of deep water, submarine and ice, are convincing enough—a special Super Panavision, Metrocolor, Cinerama claustrophobia... (The cast) are all stock types, but the absolute end of the movie—when the press version of what happened at a Russian-American polar confrontation goes out to the world—has a solid, non-stock irony that makes this another good, man's action movie, (there are no women in it) to eat popcorn by.

In the March 1969 issue of Harper's Magazine, Robert Kotlowitz wrote: "... a huge production, one of those massive jobs that swallow us alive... For action it has crash dives, paratroopers, Russian spies, off-course satellites, and a troop of Marines, the average age of whom seems to be fourteen.

It also has Rock Hudson...Patrick McGoohan...Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, and enough others to field maybe three football teams.

It comes apart a bit only when the mystery starts to unravel; but that is the nature of mysteries..." Kotlowitz's review suggests that seeing the film in theaters equipped for Super Panavision 70 played a significant role in a viewer's experience: What really got me was the kind of details that the immense, curving Cinerama screen was able to offer... Every single glistening drop of bow spray can be seen as it comes pouring over the submarine's surface, caught by a camera strapped to the conning tower.

"[31] In April 1969, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described it as "so flat and conventional that its three moments of interest are an embarrassment" and called it "a dull, stupid movie".

[32] (MGM pulled the hugely successful 2001: A Space Odyssey from Cinerama venues in order to make way for Ice Station Zebra.

[33]) Writing for TCM, Lang Thompson calls the film "a nifty thriller of spies, submarines and saboteurs that captivated no less a personage than Howard Hughes, who reportedly watched it hundreds of times.

"[35] Thompson is referring to the fact that "In the era before VCRs, Howard Hughes would call the Las Vegas TV station he owned and order them to run a particular movie.

"[36] In the September/October 1996 issue of Film Comment, director John Carpenter contributed to the magazine's long-running Guilty Pleasures feature.