He stays in Shackleton's Hut with his only links to the outside world being a two-way radio to contact the navy who occasionally visit to deliver supplies and take his letters and tape recordings to Tara.

[10] Fifteen technicians, including the producer Henry Trettin and director Al Viola, plus John Hurt, travelled to Antarctica and stayed for eight weeks living at Esperanza Base.

I felt that such drastic surgery was bound to make matters worse at such a late and critical stage but I was outvoted and landed with the unhappy task of conveying these decisions to those concerned.

"[13] Filmink later argued " it boggles the mind that" Forbes "allowed someone as green as Al Viola to direct Forbush which involved having to match footage with scenes shot in Antarctica."

[15] Anthony Shaffer, the screenwriter, recalled it as "a fairly chaotic movie which had the young John Hurt capering about the Atlantic slinging rocks at Skuas with a Roman balista, in a vain attempt to protect penguins' eggs from their deprivations.

"[8] Sidney Gilliat then on the board of British Lion called the film "a terrible hodgepodge" and felt Bryan Forbes "made a great mistake putting Hurt in it instead of [Michael] Crawford.

The film, as it has emerged from EMI, has managed not only to banish all seriousness but also to minimise the relevance of the Antarctic setting – this despite some fine, hard-edged location photography by Edward Scaife, and the drama of the wild-life sequences compiled by Arne Sucksdorff.

Of course, the novel has been through a few mutations on its way to the screen: the original version of the film, completed by Al Viola and featuring Forbush alone with his terror in the face of the cruelty of life and death in the Antarctic, has been pruned and supplemented by entirely new framing material, set in London and shot by an uncredited Roy Boulting.

This new footage inserts Hayley Mills and that weariest of old pop moralities, the futility of the promiscuous life, even bringing the point – and Forbush – confidently home with a final clinch on the London rooftops.

The surviving Antarctic material features some realistically gruelling action; but the central character is now reduced to the abbreviated, caricatured motions of a clown, comic and tragic by unconvincing turns.