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The Atomic Submarine (1959)
IMDB metadata is run time of 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 5.1 by 1,600 generous spirits.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: Numbing.
Set up: The fabled northwest passage is big business with cargo submarines passing beneath the Arctic ice cap on a polar route. But then disaster strikes: I watched this movie! Curiosity will kill not only cats. Will I ever learn to leave the unseen unseen? Probably not.
One after another of the cargo subs is blown up. No reason to be in a hurry and after about ten explosions the US Navy oozes into action. Slowly, very slowly. The budget cutters have been here. Not only is Navy impoverished so is this production.
We got this far with a ponderous voice-over of plastic models in fish tanks. Commies in the aquarium! It is all Cold War with icicles. Brrr!
America’s finest are recruited from the Retired Actors Home, shorn of their canes and crutches, and sent into action as the A for Arthritic Team. Some of the cast and crew of geriatrics started in silent movies, while others pre-date film itself.
Fortunately the screenplay does not require them to move often from the floor marks however when they do the creaking sounds are their joints not the cardboard submarine set. I ask you what kind of submarine movie is it when the captain does not once say ‘Scope up!’ and so never says ‘Scope down.’
It is almost beyond the pale yet has, surprisingly enough, some merits. First is an ongoing argument between a gung-ho sailor who wants to shoot first and a pacifist civilian scientist. We have, of course, seen this debate before, and seen it better done, but the surprising thing is that it is here at all in this paper thin screen play. Moreover, in this offering the sailor is a hot head while the scientist is the voice of reason. Some marks for good intentions on this point.
The only time the visuals rise above the high school play level is when the intrepid leads find and enter the alien ship, which is a submerged flying saucer, which we all figured out long before any of these droolers did. It is all very German expressionism and cheap, no lights, no sets and the better for it.
By the time the sub-Arctic Sea saucer was found, I realised it belonged to James Arness, aka the Giant Carrot, from The Thing (from another world) (1951), a far superior movie, having sunk through the ice, making Jim an ET with no way to get home.
There is also an echo of the Odyssey, Ripley. Don’t see that often in B minus movies.
Most of the acting is squinting with furrowed brow. Lead Arthur Franz never made it to the A-List and in this film the chip on his shoulder about that is starting to show. He almost as disdainful of his lines as I am.
The alien is a hand puppet but upstages the actors, and it has better dialogue. No wonder it got a second gig with The Simpsons. Kang did not use the lowest bidder to build the flying and submersible saucer spacecraft that is self-repairing like a living being.
Even so our heroes blow it up! It does take them three or four efforts to do so, turning a torpedo into a Polaris missile with some duct tape, but they succeed and we can all heave a sigh of relief because the film grates and grinds to a halt. They make not the slightest effort at technology transfer – theft – from the alien ship while they stumbled around on it.
Overall, it’s so bad that … it’s bad.
I was tempted to watch it after reading a biography of Hyman Rickover, who built the Nautilus, the first atomic powered submarine which transited the North Pole in 1958. There are several other atomic sub movies, but this is enough for now.