Submarines and Stock Footage

 

A few weeks ago, I reviewed the 1959 film Paratroop Command. That was released as a double-feature with Submarine Seahawk. I promised to review Seahawk the next week. But then my wife made me read a romance novel, which nearly broke my sanity and forced me to change my schedule. 

But I am now getting to Submarine Seahawk (which, by the way, is listed to having been produced in 1958--I guess they had it in the can and waited until the next year for another WWII movie with which to pair it up). 

Seahawk is a vetaran sub with a veteran crew. As the movie opens, we join them at the end of their latest cruise, using up their last few torpedoes to sink a Japanese destroyer. This almost goes wrong when one of those torpedoes gets jammed in the tube. But the sub's new operations officer--Paul Turner--acts quickly to fix the problem and launch the fish.

Everyone acknowledges Turner (played by John Bentley) to be an excellent officer in many ways. But the captain thinks he's too aloof and academic to click with a crew, so recommends that he not be given his own command.

That captain, though, finds himself promoted to a desk job when Seahawk returns to Pearl Harbor. He recommends his XO as the new commander. But the Navy decides to keep the XO in his current post and make Turner the captain.

So Turner goes to sea on an important mission--find out where the Japanese are congregating their capital ships--with a second-in-command who resents him and a crew that grows increasingly frustrated when Turner keeps refusing to attack enemy shipping.

This last part, I think, comes across as a little contrived. The crew is experienced and they might regret not being able to attack the enemy, but it's no secret that Seahawk is on a scouting mission. Everyone from the XO to the lowliest enlisted man should have understood this. They were being sneaky not so they could put a torpedo in a relatively unimportant ship. They were being sneaky so they could find the really important ship.

This all follows the expected character arcs. The officers and crew (except for an increasingly unstable rookie officer) gradually comes to respect their captain and understand that he knows what he's doing. Especially after he does indeed find the Japanese fleet.

My other complaint with the movie is that it spends far too much of its 73-minute run time at Pearl Harbor, vainly trying to generate some humor with the shenanigans the sailors get into while ashore. Much as with the humor in Paratroop Command, the humor simply falls flat.

But despite this, the movie is entertaining enough to justify its 73-minute existence. The cruise of the Seahawk does generate tension and the combat scenes are done well. This is helped enormously by use of stock footage from the Warner Brothers movies Destination Tokyo and Air Force. Apparently, the producer has a contact at WB and was able to wangle permission to use the footage. This is skillfully woven into Submarine Seahawk, making it look far more impressive than its tiny budget would have otherwise allowed.

Also, the cramped sets on the submarine look authentic and the procedures they use have a verneer of realism to them. Of course, there could be any number of operational or procedural errors in the film that I just wouldn't notice, but the film either gets a lot of it right or fakes it well.