Sealed Cargo

Another movie that sounded interesting enough to record the last time TCM had it on, which I think was during the Memorial Daywar movie marathon, was Sealed Cargo. Recently, I finally watched it off my DVR.

Although this is a World War II movie, it's got a different focus than a lot of the war movies. In this case, the main focus is on a fishing boat that gets mixed up with the war in a pretty big way. Now, the men who captained fishing boats were, I'm assuming, exempted from the draft because they were producing food for both the home front and even more importantly the fighting men. The ship here is the Daniel Webster, an old fishing vessel sailing out of Gloucester MA and plying the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland, which was a big fishing area until the fishery collapsed a generation or so ago. The Daniel Webster is captained by Capt. Banyon (Dana Andrews).

Andrews has a bit of a rag-tag crew, including a couple of Danish refugee seamen, Konrad and Holger. He also gets approached by a woman, Margaret McLean (Carla Balenda) who is asking for transport to Newfoundland where her family supposedly lives. This ought to set off alarm bells for Capt. Banyon as it's totally against protocal, and with a war on who the hell is taking on strange passengers. But Banyon must be thinking with his little head or something, and takes Margaret aboard.

Sure enough, the radio goes kaput, and there are enough people on board to suspect of sabotage. But the Daniel Webster is about to have bigger problems when it runs across a Danish fishing vessel that's adrift and seemingly damaged. Banyon boards that ship and surmises something might be wrong because the gun damage is not below the waterline, and that's where you'd shoot if you were trying to sink a boat. Further, it's only drifting, but it seems to be abandoned. Well, they do find the captain, Skalder (Claude Rains), and one dead body.

Capt. Banyon is suspicious, but tows the ship to Newfoundland anyway. At least here he finds out that Margaret does have a father living here and working with the Canadian navy. (Technically, Newfoundland was still a separate dominion and wouldn't join Canada until 1949, but I'd have to do some research to see how Newfoundland's defense was handled during World War II.) But as he's still suspicious, he takes the opportunity to board the Danish surreptitiously. Somehow, he happens to find the hidden latch that opens the cargo hold to reveal a second cargo hold, which holds... a bunch of torpedoes! This boat is supplying all those German U-boats that have been plying the North Atlantic!

So Skalder is really German, and you know that he's going to try to figure out a way to overcome Capt. Banyon and get his boat back out on the North Atlantic to resupply those U-boats. Fortunately for Skalder, his crew that "abandoned" ship wound up in the same port, setting up the movie's climax....

Sealed Cargo is a decided B movie, despite the presence of two reasonably big stars in Andrews and Rains. It was also made at RKO, which means that it doesn't quite have the production values that some of the other studios had. Despite this, the story is still effective enough that the movie ultimately works. It's not the greatest movie you'll ever see by any stretch of the imagination, but it's an entertaining enough diversion.