Sunday, September 6, 2020

Well-made submarine movie #8782578923782587924657962794

Another of the movies I only recently got around to watching after having recorded months ago is Up Periscope. It's another of the many movies available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

The scene is 1942, somehwere in the Pacific. Paul Stevenson (Edmond O'Brien) commands the Barracuda, a submarine patrolling the ocean but currently staying underwater and not moving to avoid detection by the Japanese. Unfortunately they've got an injured seaman aboard, and having to stay motionless delays their getting back to Hawaii to get the seaman to hospital. This delay results in the guy dying.

Stateside, in San Diego, Navy Lt. (JG) Kenneth Braden (James Garner) is frolicking on the beach with Sally Johnson (Andra Martin). They only met a week and a half earlier, but with a war on, Kenneth thinks the time is right to ask Sally to marry him. She demurs, suggesting that she needs more time. Unfortunately for Kenneth, this more time is interrupted by his receiving orders to report to Hawaii for a mission. Not that he should be surprised, of course, considering he's in the Navy.

As you can probably guess, Lt. Braden is going to get assigned to the Barracuda, or else we wouldn't have had that opening scene. Before that, however, we learn the nature of of Braden's mission. This being 1942, the tide of war hasn't yet begun to turn, and the Japanese are able to send coded messages to all their ships in the Pacific courtesy of a radio relay in the Marshall Islands. The Americans have been spectacularly unable to break that code, so they'd like to send a frogman ashore to the island where the Japanese have that radio station, and get pictures of the codebook.

It seems like an impossible mission, and to be honest there are a lot of problems along the way. Braden is roomed with first mate Lt. Carney (Carleton Carpenter) and Lt. Malone (Alan Hale Jr.), but isn't allowed to reveal the nature of his mission to them. Only Cmdr. Stevenson knows, and he's strict but fair. As an example, when Braden proposes the submarine drop him off 500 yards from shore, Stevenson is aghast because this means going in to the lagoon where there's a perfectly good chance he could be trapped.

On the way to the island, they have to surface to refresh the air supply, and on one of those surfacings, they're spotted by Japanese planes who strafe the sub, killing Lt. Carney among others. Of course the sub survives, because we wouldn't have a movie if it had been destroyed before getting to the island for Braden's mission. Get there they do, and Stevenson has more bad news for Braden. He's only got 18 hours to do the mission, and if he's not back to the sub by that time, they'll leave without him.

I've commented before on other submarine movies that there's only so much you can do in a submarine movie because you simply can't open up a submarine to more sets. In the case of Up Periscope, the writers tried to broaden things by adding the Braden character, giving a good half-hour climax on land and the typical suspense of the ship waiting for him and whether he'd get back to the sub on time. (You can probably guess how that's going to end.)

Still, Up Periscope works, largely because most of the submarine movies I've watched have worked rather well. Garner does a more than adequate job as Braden, and O'Brien is equally good as Stevenson. As for the rest of the cast, they're in supporting roles and don't do anything to detract from the movie. This being a submarine movie, there's nothing special here, but also nothing wrong. If you want to see an entertaining World War II movie you haven't seen before, than Up Periscope is certainly worth a watch.

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