[On September 7th, 1776, the Revolutionary forces employed the Turtle, the first submersible to be used in warfare. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that event and other submarine stories in our history and culture, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of my favorite people who has a special sub connection!]
On takeaways from five of the countless great sub movies.
- Run Silent, Run Deep (1958): For some time after World War II, and with of course clear but rare exceptions, most of the cultural works depicting that conflict did so through straightforward, familiar war stories. That’s definitely the case with Run Silent, not least because the 1955 novel from which it was adapted was written by a U.S. submarine officer, Captain Edward L. Beach Jr. And while that might mean the stories aren’t as complex as they might be, it also provides a striking degree of authenticity, one that this film’s director Robert Wise amplified through (among other choices) the use of submariners as technical advisors. If those famous torpedo attacks feel genuine, there’s a good reason why.
- On the Beach (1959): I said a lot of what I would want to say about this very, very different film (based on an equally very different novel) in that hyperlinked post. I agree with my past self that the choice of a submarine for the setting is largely to “create a broadly claustrophobic tone,” but I would add this: one of the main uses of submarines during the Cold War, as we’ll see with the final film in this list, was as a potential delivery mechanism for nuclear weapons. So making a sub the setting of a story about the aftermath of a nuclear war is about as clear a statement as possible about what changed in the world since the time in which Run Silent was set.
- Das Boot (1981): By far the most interesting thing about Das Boot, to this FilmStudier at least, is that it was the debut for German director Wolfgang Petersen, who would go on to direct countless mainstream Hollywood (and very American) films including the Clint Eastwood Secret Service film In the Line of Fire (1993) and the Harrison Ford thriller Air Force One (1997). But perhaps the most telling pairing for Das Boot would be with Petersen’s The Perfect Storm (2000), as both depict the harsh realities of their extreme nautical settings; “a journey to the edge of the mind” was Boot’s tagline in German, and I think it captures the experience of life on a submarine as well as any cultural work ever has.
- The Hunt for Red October (1990): Much of what I said in that hyperlinked post about both the flaws and the successes of Tom Clancy’s 1984 debut novel translates to the 1990 film adaptation as well (including the delightful choice to cast a very young Courtney B. Vance as “Jonesy”). The choice to cast English-speaking actors in all of the main Russian roles could be seen as another refusal to humanize the Russian adversaries, or at least a slap in the face of the Russian actors who could have been chosen instead. But I might make the opposite case, and argue that casting such beloved actors as Sean Connery and Sam Neill as sympathetic Soviet sub officers could help an audience see past the national ideologies and realize that these are all servicemen, representing the worst and best of war alike.
- Crimson Tide (1995): Of the submarine story tropes that started with Run Silent, Run Deep, critic Alan Farrell writes that “the Executive Officer hates the Skipper and smolders valiantly in that compressed environment with the tacit complicity of the crew until the Old Man just plain old blows his stack and then we have a shouting match and, as is the way with guys, things get better and we outwit the [you supply it] lurking there beyond in the somber depths to sail home at last.” That is very much the plot of this enjoyable but obvious Denzel Washington-Gene Hackman two-hander, reminding us that just because the Cold War ended, the tropes didn’t have to. But the film does raise some more complicated questions about war than many of those prior stories, as illustrated by its best line, from one of Hackman and Washington’s many back-and-forth scenes: when Hackman’s Captain Ramsey asks Washington’s Commander Hunt “exactly who the real enemy is,” Hunter replies, “In my humble opinion, in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself.”
Last SubStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Sub stories you’d share?
Leave a Reply