Where Eagles Dare (1968)

A breathless tale of derring-do involving parachute drops into snowy forests and an assault on a mountaintop Nazi fortress, it remains a cult classic and (almost) everyone’s favourite war film. For more on the making of it – Richard Burton’s four vodkas a day habit (bottles, that is), and how director Brian Hutton had to tell Clint Eastwood to stop twirling his gun before holstering it – check out Geoff Dyer’s book, inevitably titled Broadsword Calling Danny Boy. Also in the cast are Glasgow-born actress Mary Ure and cult horror star Ingrid Pitt.

The Guns Of Navarone (1961)

Ice Cold In Alex director J Lee Thompson helmed this epic war movie, set in the Aegean in 1943, which threw together Gregory Peck, David Niven, Stanley Baker, the Anthonys Quinn and Quayle and Greek screen legend Irene Papas. The plot? A suicide mission to knock out a pair of massive German guns and save the 2000 Allied soldiers pinned down under their fire. Released in 1961, it garnered seven Oscar nominations.

Ice Station Zebra (1968)

Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine and Patrick McGoohan star in this Cold War thriller, set around a British weather station in the Arctic and directed by the great John Sturges. Submarines, Soviet double agents, crashed satellites, secret film – it has the lot. It didn’t do brilliantly at the box office, but like the best MacLean adaptations it’s incredibly tense. John Carpenter is a huge fan and you can see its influence on his 1982 hit, The Thing.

Breakheart Pass (1975)

A curio in the MacLean oeuvre not only for its setting in the American West but also for its time period – 1870. Still, at least the weather’s cold and awful, a MacLean trademark. The setting is a train heading through the Sierra Nevada mountain range to a town supposedly suffering an outbreak of diphtheria. Also on board, notorious criminal John Deakin under the watchful eye of a US Marshall. Charles Bronson is Deacon (picture below), Jill Ireland also stars. A box office flop, it has since been re-appraised and recently came to Blu-ray courtesy of cult re-issue specialists Eureka!

The Herald:

Force 10 From Navarone (1978)

A sequel to the 1961 film directed by James Bond veteran Guy Hamilton, this time involving a behind-the-lines operation in Yugoslavia designed to winkle out a German spy. Iconic Spaghetti Western star Franco Nero plays the bad guy, and the rest of the cast is no less intriguin. There’s Bond girl Barbara Bach, fresh from The Spy Who Loved Me; Rocky star Carl Weathers (aka Apollo Creed); and a certain Harrison Ford, who squeezed this one in between work on Star Wars and Apocalypse Now.

Bear Island (1979)

Hammer veteran Don Sharp was re-united with his Face Of Fu Manchu star Christopher Lee for this film based on MacLean’s 1971 novel. The setting is an island in the Svalbard Archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, where an international group of UN climate scientists led by Donald Sutherland’s Frank Lansing find themselves embroiled in a mystery surrounding the former U-boat base (in which Lansing’s father was stationed, wouldn’t you know?) and a shipment of gold one of the Nazi submarines may have carried there. Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Widmark and Lloyd Bridges also star.

When Eight Bells Toll (1971)

One of the few MacLean novels to have a Scottish setting, this one centres on the fictitious town of Torbay. It was modelled on Tobermory, also where Belgian director Étienne Périer’s film adaptation was shot. It stars Anthony Hopkins, Robert Morley and Jack Hawkins alongside Nathalie Delon, ex-wife of French New Wave great Alain, and the plot involves a hijacking and a load of gold bullion. The score is by noted composer Angela Morley, formerly Walter Stott, who had transitioned a year earlier and was then living as a transgender woman.

Puppet On A Chain (1971)

The first of three adaptations directed by Geoffrey Reeve, who had formed a production partnership with MacLean in the late 1960s, Puppet On A Chain dips into the same world of European heroin smuggling as The French Connection, only here the setting is Amsterdam. Swedish actor Sven Bertil-Taube stars alongside Barbara Parkins, and a boat chase sequence (actually shot by Don Sharp) influenced a similar scene in Live And Let Die. Sharp claimed in 2007 he was still receiving royalties from the film.

Fear Is The Key (1972)

Barry Newman, fresh from cult hit Vanishing Point, stars in this US-set thriller directed by Michael Tuchner. The baroque, convoluted plot involves an heiress, an oil platform and a staged shooting. Today it’s most notable for being Ben Kingsley’s first film outing and for its soundtrack, written by jazz pianist Roy Budd, who also scored Get Carter.

Caravan To Vaccarès (1974)

The second of Reeve’s MacLean adaptations, this one finds David Birney and Charlotte Rampling playing an American backpacker and a British photographer travelling in the south of France who find themselves embroiled in a plot to smuggle an escaped Hungarian scientists to the West. Critic Derek Malcolm wrote that Burney was “as expressive as a constipated owl”.