The Enemy Below

A movie that's been in the FXM rotation for a little while now is The Enemy Below. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM and Monday at 6:00 AM, so you've got a couple more chances to watch.

The USS Haynes is a destroyer setting off for a tour of the South Atlantic during World War II, on patrol to prevent German ships and submarines from doing whatever it is they do. The crew isn't necessarily certain of their new captain, Murrell (Robert Mitchum), in part because he lost his last command, a Merchant Marine boat, when it got torpedoed in the North Atlantic by the Germans. Some think Lt. Ware (David Hedison, who I think was still credited as Al as he was at the beginning of his career), the second-in-command, should have been promoted, but as he admits, his experience in captaining is limited to yachts in Miami.

But they're all here to patrol, and with the radar on, they quickly find a surfaced Nazi U-Boat, which is captained by Von Stolberg (Curt Jurgens). Von Stolberg dives and sonar from the Haynes starts pinging the U-boat and following it, trying to keep up the same course and speed so that the Nazis might think this is just an echo and not actually a ship following them. But Von Stolberg is no dummy, having been in command of submarines for years, and fires torpedoes at the US ship, narrowly missing.

Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game between the two veteran captains, but of whom are intelligent and have a pretty darn good idea of what the other is thinking and planning to do, which isn't going to make getting out of this sitation easy for either of them.

It's a bit tough to give much more of a synopsis than the above, mostly because this being a submarine pursuit film, there's not much more that can be done. I suppoe you could build up characters' back stories, but that isn't particularly necessary.

Having said that, however, The Enemy Below is quite good. It does move a bit slow at times, but again I think that's part of the nature of a submarine pursuit movie. Since the submarine is hiding out underwater, there's a lot of waiting going on that just can't be helped. I think I preferred The Bedford Incident slightly for adding a reporter character which opened things up a bit, and even Run Silent, Run Deep. But The Enemy Below is still an excellent example of the genre and well worth a watch.

Unfortunately, the print FXM ran is both letterboxed and pillarboxed (at least on my TV I was able to blow it up and as far as I could tell keep the proper aspect ratio). But it's also on DVD if you want to obtain it that way.