HMS Defiant

I recorded several movies from when Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month, and now I'm getting around to watching another of them that I had never seen before it showed up: that movie is Damn the Defiant!.

The movie starts off with a title card informing us that the action is taking place in Spithead, England, in 1797. We then see a small landing boat heading from the HMS Defiant anchored just offshore to the harbor. On that boat is the captain, Crawford (Alec Guinness) and his second-in-command, Lt. Scott-Padget (Dirk Bogarde). If you've seen the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty, you'll know that this is a press gang, looking for innocent people to be forced into serving on a ship that doesn't have enough of a crew. As you can guess, the good people in town are absolutely not thrilled to see a press gang showing up.

Meanwhile, hiding out in the basement of one of the taverns is a group of sailors, some part of the Royal Navy's Channel Fleet and some part of the Mediterranean Fleet. One of the leaders of this group, Vizard (Anthony Quayle), informs us that the sailors are looking for better conditions at sea, and that they're willing to "strike" if necessary, which really means a mutiny. Vizard and the rest of the cabal obviously don't want it known what's going on.

Back to the officers of the Defiant. It's really Scott-Padgett's job to impress those sailors into duty. Crawford is ashore because his wife and son live in Spithead. The younger Crawford is hoping to follow his father into service, being fast-tracked into the officers' corps unlike those poor seamen who were pressed into service. These scenes also serve to set up part of the dramatic conflict, which is that Crawford is the "humane" officer while Scott-Padget is an absolute dick, even though one does need quite a bit of discipline to be able to go out to sea and then fight the upcoming threat of the French.

The Admiralty has indeed allowed the younger Crawford to join his father as a midshipman, and the Defiant soon sets sail for the Mediterranean. Capt. Crawford doesn't want Scott-Padget to show any favoritism to the younger Crawford, so the lieutenant responds not only by not showing favoritism, but by showing anti-favoritism, treating him so badly that the captain starts looking for ways to get his son off the ship.

Matters come to a head when Capt. Crawford falls ill, and has to give command over to Scott-Padget. He's so bad to the sailors that they finally decide to mutiny in a move not related to the more general mutiny Vizard and his men had been planning at the beginning of the movie and that, as far as they know since there was no good way to communicate with other ships in those days, has not yet taken place.

Damn the Defiant! is a well-made entry into the historical naval genre. I don't know that there's anything terribly original. I made a comment once about one of the submarine movies that there's only so much you can do in the confined spaces of a submarine. Likewise, there's only so much you can do on a Napoleonic era ship, both because of the confined spaces and because of the historical limitations. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with these constraints; it's just that if you're looking for something truly original, you'll be hard-pressed to find it in pretty much any naval movie.

Despite those constraints, Damn the Defiant! is one that absolutely deserves a watch, in no small part thanks to the fine performances from its leads. It's definitely one to look out for.