Ice Cold in Alex (1958)
Synopsis
Ice Cold in Alex is a British war film directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring John
Mills and Anthony Quayle. Based on a 1957 novel of the same title by British Des-
ert War veteran Christopher Landon, the film follows the perilous journey of a Brit-
ish military ambulance from eastern Libya to Alexandria, Egypt, after the fall of
Tobruk to Rommel’s Afrika Korps in May 1942.
Background
En glishman Christopher Guy Landon (1911–1961) served with the 51st Field
Ambulance and the 1st South African Division in North Africa during the Second
World War. After the war Landon became a novelist specializing in noir thrillers.
“Escape in the Desert,” a fictional story grounded in his war experiences, was seri-
alized in six consecutive issues of The Saturday Eve ning Post (21 July–5 August 1956)
and then expanded into his fourth novel, entitled Ice Cold in Alex (Heinemann,
1957). Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) secured the film rights, then
hired Landon to work with staff screenwriter T. J. Morrison and script supervisor
Walter Mycroft to adapt the novel to the screen, a pro cess that coincided with Land-
on’s turning his scenario into a full- length novel— though novel and script differ
markedly. W. A. Whitaker was brought in to produce and J. Lee Thompson (The
Dam Busters; Guns of Navarone) to direct. Initially the proj ect had the support of
the British military, but once it became apparent that the film would have little
recruiting value, support evaporated.
Production
Ice Cold in Alex was shot mostly in Libya over a two- month period in the fall of
1957; Egypt was ruled out because of the recent Suez Crisis. The shoot in Libya
was a difficult one, with cast and crew being plagued by weeks of temperatures
exceeding 100°, windblown sand, and swarms of flies that were fought off with
DDT, a pesticide now banned as toxic to humans. The quicksand scene was actu-
ally filmed in an ice- cold artificial bog at Elstree Studios in London— a grueling
experience for Quayle and Mills. The brief love scene between Diana Murdoch and
Anson toward the end of the film was originally eight minutes longer and far steam-
ier but was largely excised, per order of the British Board of Film Censors. The
famous bar scene in Alexandria at the end of the film, shot at Elstree just before
Christmas 1957, required John Mills to drink real beer because ginger ale and other