Having tried to track this down for years, by virtue of partner's late father having served in Royal Navy corvettes in WW2 - and having visited the last surviving Flower-class, HMCS Sackville, in Halifax NS last autumn, this film's presentation in the National Film Theatre's 2011 Howard Hawks season was a chance not to be missed. It ran wildly over budget for a routine flag waver; in places, if Randolph Scott's acting had been any more wooden, they could have made a table out of him. Clichés abound; punches are pulled ("Where's Number One?" "He's dead, sir"), the model work is creaky (as is the script in places) even for the time. But the action footage, shot on real convoys, is of genuine interest and atmosphere and as others have said, it captures the awful, cramped, sodden hell of it all we heard about. "The Cruel Sea" it certainly is not; we don't know if my partner's Dad ever saw this film, but I'm sure he would have approved.
Review of Corvette K-225
