User Reviews

Take a gangster in hiding, a detective who happens to have known him in civilization, some tough New York chorus girls and submarine driving Nazis and you've got the type of World War II nonsense that could only come from PRC. The storyline starts off silly and continues to grow more silly as time progresses. John Liteland Alan Baxter are dettective and former gangster, with eccentric Eric Blore trying vainly to thow in some sophistication. Over-the-top Iris Adrian bellows every one of her lines as if she was biting into a lobster, shell and all. Yes, there's plenty of action and hand saluting patriotism, but it is all falsely presented.

I agree, Alan Baxter was kind of dull in this. But my main beef with this movie is it's simply too hard to believe that this guy can cause six UBoots to sink and the Germans don't figure out to stop sending boats there for resupply.

Our hero, a character with a questionable history, has set up his own little anti-submarine corps. Supplying torpedoes to the Kreigsmarine. However he rigs one to explode on it's own and tells the captain to go out and sit on the bottom for four hours, supposedly because of the tide. Of course it's really so...well you get the idea. He then pays for a party so there's too much noise to hear the submarine blow up...and never any wreckage I suppose. Why not just let the thing sail out and blow up at some random time? So six boats go missing right after making contact with this guy and yet the Nazis don't suspect a thing. Oh well, there was a war on and they needed to keep the morale up so they made movies like this.

Normally I can suspend disbelief but this one is just too far-fetched. Even though I do like this movie, 5/10

I had insomnia the other night, and took a random disk from 50 Combat Classics, bought for $10 from a Walmart. One of the films on the disk I grabbed was this, "Submarine Base". So, into the DVD it went...and, I was treated to a video, lifted from a scratched B&W print, that had muddy, and, frankly, weird audio,. The film was, of course, in mono, but, randomly, the center channel of my surround sound cut out.

As far as the story, massive suspension of belief was required to believe that, A. the Germans would contract with a couple of citizens that were from belligerent enemy countries, to run an, on-shore, resupply depot. B. That an implied gangster would have the technical knowledge to be able to rig an warhead charge to explode, using 1930s-1940s wrist watches as timers, and that the sabotaged warheads, usually, "shaped" charges on torpedoes, would be enough to sink a submarine with an internal explosion. Moreover, the running gag about the guy "losing" his wristwatches, that is developed early in the plot, completely lacked subtlety. C. That the sole survivor of a torpedoed merchant ship would be an ex-cop who knew the gangster. D. And, as others have mentioned here, that the Germans wouldn't have noticed the pattern of sub losses, after resupply.

Now, for the acting, a North American pine forest would be less wooden than the two leads. Of course, Alan Baxter has to keep his motives hidden, but, still, the whole poker face routine, combined with the illogical position of him showing compassion enough to the cop/merchant sailor to even rescue him, while allowing such a threat to his supposed resupply operation to exist, is completely incongruent . Then there is John Litle, who plays the cop as a thick chunkhead, who, at his introduction, starts preaching about patriotic duty, and at the end, breaks the fourth wall to lecture the audience on the same subject.

So, was I entertained? Well, it killed 65 minutes of insomniac time, but, is in no way worth a second viewing, was ham handed, and unskillfully plotted. I gave it three stars out of 10. As far as films I've seen on the Mill Creek 50 Combat Classics, Go For Broke, One Of Our Aircraft is Missing, Spitfire, Eagle in a Cage, Immortal Battalion, and Three Came Home have been the best of the collection that I've seen, so far.

A Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) film from 1943 set on an island somewhere on the equator about a hoodlum from New York who is supplying torpedoes to German U-Boats and a shipwrecked former cop James Xavier 'Jim' Taggart from New York who happens to drift by the hoodlum's boat (and who knew him in New York!) and begins to suspect something is not right. Mix in a bunch of chorus girls and men from various nations and you get something far fetched and rather dull. The plot is thin. For instance, where does Joe Morgan get the torpedoes from? He's not connected to the US Navy. You can't buy them at the local store and he only had one guy, Spike, to help him. All rather silly.

Alan Baxter as Joe Morgan is rather insipid and seems to wear the same expression throughout the film. Familiar face John Litel plays the ex- detective as best as the lame script will allow. The great Eric Blore plays Spike with a dodgy cockney accent and brings the only entertainment to the film.

Made as a patriotic film to support the war effort which is laudable but it is also laughable.

Base American fugitive Joe Morgan, now a ship's captain is running a reloading base for Nazi submarines. While out on the sea he picks up a man floating in the water. It's a cop who Morgan thought framed him for murder. The cop is now merchant seaman. Morgan takes the cop to St Jean, a small island where pirates once hung out and quick buck can be made. At this point the film becomes the story of what happens on land as Morgan tries to deal with the cop, the girls who want to go back to America and the people on the island. Good but should have been great film is sunk by the actor playing Morgan. How this guy ended up as the lead in anything is beyond me since he's so stiff and wooden that one wonders what cigar store is missing their Indian. Still the film is worth seeing with the sequences involving the Nazi subs and subterfuge around them is good enough to over come any flaws.