Torpedo Run

In looking through my scheduled recordings on Youtube TV, I noticed a couple of movies that I recorded the last time they were on TCM. Ernest Borgnine is the star being saluted tomorrow (August 25) in Summer Under the Stars, and I just happen to have one of his movies on the DVR already that I haven't blogged about yet. That movie is Torpedo Run, which shows up at 6:00 PM on August 25. With that in mind, I sat down to watch the movie in order to be able to do a more timely review of it here.

Technically, the star of the movie is Glenn Ford, in yet another World War II movie, although this time it's most definitely not a service comedy. Ford plays Lt. Cmdr. Barney Doyle, commander of the Greyfish, a submarine plying the Pacific. As the movie opens, it's late 1942, and Doyle gets orders to try to destroy the Shimaru, a Japanese aircraft carrier that was part of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Meanwhile, everybody on the sub, led by Doyle's second-in-command Lt. Archie Sloan (Ernest Borgnine), is worried about Doyle because of his family.

Flash back to December 1941. Doyle and his wife (Diane Brewster) are living at one of the US military bases near Manila; recall that the Philippines were an American colony at the time. It's also on the other side of the International Date Line, so technically the attack on Pearl Harbor would have happened in the overnight hours between Sunday, Dec. 7 and Monday, Dec. 8 Manila time and the military people in the Philippines probably would have been woken up to the news of the attack, not at a garden party of the sort that's portrayed here. Doyle has been wanting his wife to head back to the States to save her and the kid, but she was born in Manila and considers it her home, so she's going to stay.

Of course, Japan took the Philippines over during the war and interned the westerners. In the context of the movie, Doyle is informed when he gets the order to go after the Shimaru that the Japanese have two destroyers guarding it, as well as a ship carrying a bunch of POWs -- which would include his family since they were on the base -- from the Philippines to Japan. There's a pretty good chance that when Doyle tries to destroy the Shimaru that he might also destroy the ship carrying his own wife.

Sure enough, that happens; worse, the Greyfish goes into Tokyo Bay where it pretty much gets trapped with a limited number of torpedoes and has to try to figure its way out of the bay and back to Pearl Harbor. Doyle has a crisis of leadership with Sloan tries to paper over in the hopes that he can prevent Doyle from being relieved of active command and stuck behind a desk for the duration of the war.

Since the movie is only half over by the time they get back to Pearl Harbor, we know that the Greyfish is going to have another chance to go after the Shimaru. Complicating matters is that Doyle's commander, Adm. Setton (Philip Ober), wants to give Sloan a command of his own as Sloan is one of the best first officers in the fleet.

I've argued before that there's only so much you can do with a submarine movie thanks to the inherent spatial limitations on a submarine. Torpedo Run has that issue; as a result there's not all that much original here. It's not to say that Torpedo Run is a bad movie, more that you've seen it before even if you haven't. If you want a World War II movie you haven't seen before, then Torpedo Run isn't a bad choice.