I was drawn to this because of the fantastic cast so it made an instant poor impression because so many of them were sporting silly accents and I'm not sure it ever really recovered. An American (Donald Sutherland) and a Norwegian (Vanessa Redgrave) fall prey to an ex-Nazi (Richard Widmark) seeking gold from a U-boat in the Arctic.

That’s due in large part to the action sequences put together by second unit director and stunt co-ordinator, Vic Armstrong. The setting is a tiny, remote and generally uninhabited Norwegian island where U-boat pens from WWII still conceal hidden gold. Meanwhile, Lindquist finds a message left by Larsen, who had been a Norwegian agent, confirming that Jungbeck and Heyter are neo-Nazis controlled by a third expedition member codenamed Zelda. The murders continue ashore, and Marlowe, who is not what he seems to be either, discovers they may be related to some forgotten events of the Second World War. We know Sutherland isn't the bad guy because he is the hero, but his father was a U-Boat captain who died on the island.Richard Widmark ("Otto") heads up a group of scientists on the eponymous island that was formerly used as a Nazi submarine base. Alistair Stuart MacLean (1922-1987) was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and spent his growing years nearby in Daviot, ten miles south of Inverness.

Peter Snell enlisted director Don Sharp, who had worked on an adaptation of MacLean's Puppet on a Chain. His next novel of The Guns of Navarone (1957), still considered one of the giants in the very large and good field of thrillers based retrospectively in World War II.One of their colleagues already on the island has gone missing (murdered you understand), it will become apparent later that he is a Norwegian intelligence operative. However, several of them turn out to be more interested in the fact that (according to the film) there was a German U-boat base on the island during the Second World War. Time was you only had to mention Nazi gold and you’d have a loyal readership clamouring for more, but as the decades moved to the nineteen-eighties, it was all sounding a bit old hat, and Raiders of the Lost Ark illustrated that something particularly special had to be done with the villains of so many years from the thirties onwards to make a genuine impact from then on.