The Enemy Below (1957).
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 38 minutes, rated 7.4 by 11,180 cinematizens.
Genre: War; Species: Submarine.
Verdict: Age has not wearied it.
Two professional warriors square off, and tactical deadlock ensues.
The same can be said of the movie itself – professional, and evenly balanced.
It is directed with a sure hand by that song and dance man from Arkansas who managed to get the use of a US Navy ship and crew, and who recruited and funded great cinematography. Never did CinemaScope look so good, even on a computer screen. The blue expanse compares with the opening scene of Lawrence of Arabia that came a few years later.
The performances are effortless, and unencumbered with emotional backstories, wrung dry as they are these days, evidently, for a slow-witted audience. Back stories are there, to be sure, but put to one side. Robert Mitchum, as always, seems born into the part; it fits him like an old glove.
A sampling of the critics’ reviews linked to the IMDb page reveals more about the critics than the movie. Their remarks are positive but guarded, as if the writer fears that praising such a simple, well-told tale somehow diminishes one’s status as a discerning critic, ergo many of the compliments are left-handed, needlessly qualified, and vague.
Strange to say for a war movie but there is little violence until the last act. The teenage-boy pyrotechnics — think Greyhound — favoured by the arrested-development directors of Holly- and Pinewood are absent. Nor is any love interest forced into the story by flashbacks. Instead we have parallel character studies on the blue water as the two protagonists take one another’s measure by feint, manoeuvre, and, hardest of all, by waiting quietly for the other to blink. It does have some great special effects for the era, though not the eye-popping, bone-shaking of Das Boot.
I came across it quite by chance while You Tube surfing, and remembering it fondly, if vaguely, from the Rivoli Theatre, started to watch the first few minutes…and 97 minutes later it ended.