An exciting tale of Captain Randolph Scott, his corvette and his crew, shepherding an allied convoy from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to England, and fighting off U-boats along the way.
Scott and some of his men have survived the sinking of their previous ship. Scott visits the sister, Ella Raines, of one of his officers killed in action. The fall improbably in love. And when Scott departs on his new ship, he takes with him Raines' other brother, James Brown, who just graduated from midshipman school or whatever it's called. Perhaps out of a sense of guilt, Scott bears down heavily on his new Sub Lieutenant, and Brown is at first petulant but eventually shapes up and helps save the ship in its final combat with a U-boat.
I don't know for sure that I should have used the word "improbable" to describe the immediate affection that develops between Scott and Raines. In fact, the whole movie is one improbability after another. The greatest improbability of all is probably the fact that a Canadian corvette is able to sink two U-boats with her depth charges all by herself. With the technology available when the film was made, it just seems unlikely. Corvettes were relatively small, uncomfortable, and lightly armed. On the surface, they stood about an even chance against a submarine, and with their flank speed of 16 knots or so they could be outrun.
There are many familiar faces among the crew and there's no need to list them all but it's a surprise to see Peter Lawford, Charles McGraw, and Cliff Robertson among the uncredited. The relationships below decks is reasonably familiar too. A pair of seamen are known for their good-natured fist fights. A dog is smuggled aboard. (Howard Hawks shamelessly copied himself and sometimes others. The smuggled dog appears in Hawks' "Air Force" too.) Barry Fitzgerald is the stereotypical Irishman. The men suffer all sorts of tribulations, including oil in the coffee and rough weather with everything banging about. In school I always wondered what happened to a man who became sea sick. How much time does he get off? Is there any medicine? I found out when I was a Seaman Second Class. You get no time off, you stand your watch and there is no medicine. If your station is not on a weather deck, you're provided with a bucket to puke in. The King's navy knocked off that "tot of rum" business aboard ship about forty years ago, joining the rest of us bluenoses in our abstention.
The narrative bogs down considerably near the beginning, when Scott, Raines, and Brown are working out the values of their triad. We all want them to get to sea and start the movie but, at the time, it was considered de rigueur to insert a love interest, presumably to keep the female audience occupied. Usually, as here, it detracts from the movie's impact, but it needn't have if it's handled more than perfunctorily, as it was in "Pride of the Marines." Studio sets alternate with combat footage. They're reasonably well integrated. In some ways it reminded me of Warner's "Action in the North Atlantic" only it wasn't so action packed. It didn't remind me very much of "The Cruel Sea," which is far superior to either of the others.
A surprise was the performance of Randolph Scott as the skipper. Scott's performances alternated between a kind of cocky self-confidence and a stony taciturnity. In his fine series of inexpensive Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher in the 1950s, he could be a real spoilsport. But here he's subdued and authoritative without being at all grim. He may have put more into his part in this infrequently seen movie than in any of his others. Ella Raines is completely unnecessary but she was certainly beautiful in a strictly conventional way. He hair is dark, long, wavy, and lustrous. Any normal man would want to run barefoot through it. James Brown became a Warner's stalwart and, except for a certain amiable quality, had only a modest talent but it worked for him.
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