Captain Anson, the officer commanding a British RASCMotor Ambulance Company in Tobruk, is suffering from battle fatigue and alcoholism. Ahead of the Siege of Tobruk by the German Afrika Korps, Anson and most of his unit are ordered to evacuate to Alexandria. During the evacuation 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] The quartet decide to drive across the desert back to British lines.
As they depart they come across an AfrikanerSouth African officer, Captain van der Poel, who carries a large pack, to which he seems very attached. After the South African shows Anson two bottles of gin in his backpack, van der Poel persuades Anson to let him join their drive to the safety of the British lines in Alexandria.
Publicity poster for the North American release of the film. The ambulance, Katy, has become stuck in the sand.
En route the group encounters various obstacles, including a minefield, a broken suspension spring - during its replacement van der Poel's great strength saves the group when he supports Katy on his back when the jack collapses - and the dangerous terrain of the Qattara Depression.
Twice the group encounters motorised elements of the advancing Afrika Korps; in one encounter they are fired on and Norton is fatally wounded. Anson blames himself and his drinking for Norton's death, 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 German South West Africa, is able to talk the Germans into allowing them to go on their way. The second time, however, the Germans seem reluctant until van der Poel shows them the contents of his backpack.
This pack becomes the focus of suspicion. Pugh, already troubled by van der Poel's lack of knowledge of the South African Army's tea-brewing technique, follows him when he heads off into the desert with his pack and a spade (supposedly to dig a latrine). Pugh thinks he sees an antenna. Later, at night, they decide to use the ambulance headlights to see what van der Poel is really up to. He panics, blunders into some dry quicksand and submerges his pack, though not before Anson and Murdoch see that it contains a radio set. They drag him to safety. While he recovers, they realise he is probably a German spy but decide not to confront him. During the final leg of the journey Katy must be hand-cranked in reverse up a sand dune escarpment and van der Poel's strength is again crucial to success.
Continuing their drive, the party discuss their conviction that van der Poel is a spy and decide that they do not want to see him shot. When they reach Alexandria, Anson delivers everyone's papers except van der Poel's to the Military Police check point and (off-screen) reports to the MP's senior officer that "van der Poel" is a German soldier whom they met lost in the desert and has surrendered to them under his parole (word of honour). Anson secures the MP's agreement to allow the party to enjoy a beer with their ‘captive’ before taking him into custody as a prisoner of war.
The party then make their way to a bar and Anson orders a cold beer, which he consumes with relish. But before they have drunk their first round a Corps of Military Police officer arrives to arrest van der Poel. Anson orders him to wait until the time previously agreed. Having become friends with van der Poel and indebted to him for saving the group's lives, Anson tells him that if he gives his real name he will be treated as a prisoner of war rather than as a spy (which would mean execution by firing squad).
Van der Poel admits to being Hauptmann Otto Lutz, an engineering officer with the 21st Panzer Division. Pugh, noticing that Lutz is still wearing fake South African dog tags, rips them off before the police see them. After saying his farewells and concluding that they were "all against the desert, the greater enemy", Lutz is driven away, with a new respect for the British.
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]
The film is arguably the best known credit for Sylvia Syms.[20]
Home media
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 are 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
^ abLandon, 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. Later 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.
^ abA 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). 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.
