Ice Cold In Alex

Ice Cold in Alex manages to combine a war movie with tensions of a detective story. Critics in 1958 were enthusiastic, and compared it to The Bridge on the River Kwai. Though its scale is intimate, not epic, and the Western desert is the setting, not the Burma jungle, it generates the same suspense over how enemies will solve their conflicts. An ambulance escapes from Tobruk just as the siege begins. Ahead of it lie hundreds of miles of impressive sand dunes - and then safety in Alexandria. Aboard is the shell-shocked Captain (John Mills) who dreams of sinking an 'ice-cold' glass of lager in 'Alex', a tough, reliable Sergent-Major (Harry Andrews), and a stranded hospital nurse (Slyvia Sims). They pick up a stray South African officer, who is trying to make it back to the unit. Or is he? In spite of his saving their lives from the Germans, there appears something not quite right about him - and his pack. Can he be a German spy planted on them? If so, what is his mission? And if they ever get to safety, how will they deal with him? Anthony Quayle dominates the screen - and the desert - in this enigmatic role. The movie, directed by J. Lee Thompson, is an exciting example of action cinema. Sequences like the stealthy navigation of a mine-field and the ambulance's breakneck race against German tanks have a timeless grip. And timeless, too, is the moral problem at the movie's core: how can one resolve the conflict between the harsh demands of war and the humane desire to save one another's life? The answers couldn't have been so gripplingly suggested in another medium but the cinema. Ice Cold in Alex has a sense of drama that lasts the whole movie through.