Captain Anson, the officer commanding a British RASCMotor Ambulance Company in Tobruk, is suffering from battle fatigue and alcoholism. Ahead of the Axis capture of Tobruk by the Afrika Korps, Anson's unit is ordered to evacuate to Alexandria. Anson, MSM Tom Pugh and two nurses, Sister Diana Murdoch and Sister Denise Norton, become separated from the others in an Austin K2/Y ambulance nicknamed Katy.[Note 1] Attempting to reach British lines they encounter an AfrikanerSouth African officer, Captain van der Poel. Van der Poel tells Anson he has three bottles of gin in his pack, thus persuading Anson to allow him to accompany them to safety in Alexandria.
Publicity poster for the North American release of the film. The ambulance, Katy, has become stuck in the sand.
They encounter various obstacles, including a minefield, a broken suspension spring, which van der Poel helps change, and the dangerous terrain of the Qattara Depression. In an encounter with a German motorised unit, Norton is fatally wounded by gunfire. Anson blames himself and vows not to drink any alcohol until he can have an "ice-cold lager in 'Alex'". Van der Poel, who claims to have learned German while working in South West Africa, convinces the Germans to allow them to continue. In a second encounter, the Germans seem reluctant to believe van der Poel until he shows them his pack.
Pugh, troubled by van der Poel's lack of knowledge of the South African Army's tea-brewing technique, spies on him when he walks off alone, supposedly to dig a latrine, and thinks he sees a radio antenna. At night, when they turn on the ambulance headlights to see what van der Poel is doing, he blunders into quicksand in a panic and submerges his pack. Anson and Murdoch confirm that it contains a radio set and drag him to safety. Realising van der Poel is probably a German spy, they choose not to confront him since Katy must be hand-cranked in reverse up a sand dune escarpment and his strength is crucial to their success.
The party conclude they do not want to see van der Poel shot for espionage, and after they reach Alexandria, Anson delivers everyone's papers except van der Poel's to the military police checkpoint. He reports that "van der Poel" is a lost German soldier who surrendered to them under parole. The MPs agree to let the party have a farewell drink with their captive before taking him into custody. They go into a bar where Anson downs a cold beer with relish but a Corps of Military Police officer arrives before they have finished the first round of drinks to arrest van der Poel. Anson, indebted to van der Poel for saving their lives, says that if he gives his real name he will be treated as a prisoner of war rather than executed as a spy. Van der Poel admits to being a German engineer officer, real name Otto Lutz. Pugh rips Lutz's fake South African dog tag off and they say their farewells. Before he leaves Lutz makes a short farewell speech, concluding that he had learned things about the English that were not what he had been taught, and that they were "all against the desert, the greater enemy."
The film was based on the 1957 novel Ice Cold in Alex and its serialisation (as Escape in the Desert) in the magazine Saturday Evening Post.[1]The New York Times described the book as "an excellent escape story played out in the best Hitchcock manner."[9]
The screenplay contains multiple key changes from the novel, including making Anson rather than Pugh the protagonist. ABPC bought the rights and assigned T. J. Morison to collaborate on a treatment with Landon under the supervision of Walter Mycroft.[10]
Richard Todd says he turned down a lead role because he felt the story was far fetched and he was getting tired of military roles.[11]
The producers had intended to shoot the location work for Ice Cold in Alex in Egypt, but they had to switch to Libya because of the Suez conflict.[citation needed]
Sylvia Syms (Sister Murdoch) said in a 2011 interview about the film that conditions during the desert shoot were so difficult it felt like they were actually in the situation the film portrays. She said: "You may find this hard to believe, but there was very little acting. It was horrible. We became those people ... we were those people". She said that today people would probably call it method acting, but added: 'We didn't know what Method Acting was, we just called it 'getting on with it'." Syms said that during the scene where the ambulance rolls backwards down the hill narrowly avoiding her, the actors assumed there would be a hawser to stop the vehicle if anything went wrong, but there was not. The actress said she was "pretty sure" Mills, Quayle, and Andrews angrily upbraided director J. Lee Thompson for this risky approach. She added: "He liked to push actors a bit". The quicksand sequence was filmed in an ice-cold artificial bog in an English studio (some scenes were shot at Elstree)[13] and was "very tough" on Quayle and Mills. Syms said the producers got a good deal out of her for "£30 a week", adding: "But I made a lot more when they turned it into an advert for Carlsberg". She said there are "no false heroics in it" and that she had been told by desert war veterans it is a good picture of soldiers in that theatre of war, adding: "I am proud of it".[14]
Although some sources claim that music was kept to a minimum, there is in fact a great deal of dramatic underscoring. Leighton Lucas wrote a stirring military march called "The Road to Alex", which was the main theme, and a "Romance".[16]
A Region B/2 Blu-ray restoration of Ice Cold in Alex was released in the United Kingdom on 18 February 2018.[21] A restored region B/2 version was previously released on 11 September 2011.[22] In March 2020, the film was released on Blu-ray in region A/1 (North America) by Film Movement Classics in a five-film set called Their Finest Hour 5 British War Classics.
Lager advertisement
The final scene, in which Mills's character finally gets his glass of lager, was used in the 1980s in beer advertisements on television. The scene was reportedly filmed some weeks after the rest of the film, at Elstree. Real lager had to be used to "look right", and Mills had to drink numerous glasses full until the shots were finished, and was "a little 'heady'" by the end.[23]
Sylvia Syms has said that the Danish beer Carlsberg was chosen because they could never have been seen to be drinking a German lager, since the United Kingdom and Germany were at war during the film. The beer referred to in the original novel is Rheingold, which, despite its German name, is American.[14]
Scenes from the film were used in a late-1980s television advertising campaign for the German Holsten Pils lager. Each advertisement mixed original footage from a different film (another example was The Great Escape, 1963) with new humorous material starring British comedian Griff Rhys Jones and finishing with the slogan: "A Holsten Pils Production".[24] In retaliation, rival Carlsberg simply lifted the segment in which Mills contemplates the freshly poured lager in the clearly Carlsberg-branded glass, before downing it in one go and declaring, "Worth waiting for!" This was followed by a variation in the usual Carlsberg tagline: "Still probably the best lager in the world."[23]
Notes
↑These vehicles were commonly known as Katys or Katies during their wartime service.[8][self-published source?]
References
12Landon, Christoper Guy (1957). Ice Cold in Alex. London: William Heinemann. OCLC561816348.
↑Archer, Eugene (23 March 1961). "Shortened 'Desert Attack' From Britain". The New York Times. This review states the length of Desert Attack as 64 minutes. Subsequent reviews indicate a length of 79 minutes.
↑Three Men And a Girl: Three Men And a Girl
By HERBERT MITGANG. The New York Times, 17 February 1957: BR4.
↑Harper, Sue; Porter, Vincent (2007). British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference. Oxford University Press. p.88. ISBN9780198159353. OCLC144596062. Originally published in 2003.
↑Warren, Patricia (2001). British Film Studios: An Illustrated History. London: B. T. Batsford. p.73.
12A 22-minute interview with Sylvia Syms was first published in the 2015 DVD release. See Ice Cold in Alex (Blu-Ray DVD (region B/2)). United Kingdom: Studio Canal. 2015. OCLC988601487. .
↑BRITAIN'S MOVIE SCENE: J. Arthur Rank Approves Common Market-
By STEPHEN WATTS. The New York Times, 27 October 1957: X7.
↑Atanasov, Svet (25 March 2011). "'Ice Cold in Alex' Blu-ray". Bluray.com. I cannot recommend J. Lee Thompson's Ice Cold in Alex highly enough. It is a very entertaining, beautiful film, which has been recently restored and now released on Blu-ray. ... VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Maltin, Leonard. "Ice Cold in Alex (1958)". Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Archived from the original on 16 April 2019. Well-handled psychological drama of British ambulance officer, two nurses, and a German soldier brought together in African desert. 3 of 4 stars.
Nathan, Ian (1 January 2011). "Ice Cold in Alex Review". Empire. A moving account of a group of strangers surviving the odds brings out one of John Mills' best performances. 3 of 5 stars.
Williams, Melanie (2009). "A Girl Alone in a man's World: Ice Cold in Alex (1958) and the place of women in the 1950s British war film cycle". Feminist Media Studies. 9: 95–108. doi:10.1080/14680770802619524. S2CID142658773.
