Das Boot

Top of the line–the 1981 version, that is. You got your sturm. You got your drang. You got beards like the Hatfields and McCoys by the film’s end. The grief comes, alas, becaue of the Americans and their air atttacks on the sub pens. You get the thrill of a high-speed run in heavy seas through the Straits of Gibraltar and an impish junior officer with a red beard. AND you have the Nazi “political officer” everyone despises. He doesn’t care for the crew’s taste in music, either. Maybe the best sub film of all time.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Yeah, it’s a Disney movie from 1954, but where ELSE are you going to get to see Kirk Douglas sing to a sea lion? And where else can you see James Mason, a vengeful 19th century version of Elon Musk or Richard Branson, bust up warships AND—the scene that initiated my fondness for calamari–you get Douglas in a fight to the death again a giant squid!

U-571

Any boarding party led by Pulp Fiction’s Harvey Keitel is the boarding party for me, yo-ho! Lots of good male grunting and bonding and killing and stuff, and Matthew McConaghey is the most clean-shaven sub sailor in history. Keitel’s knit cap with the little dingleball on top is a definitive fashion statement, and this depth-charge scene, from the 2000 film, nearly equals Das Boot’s. Nearly.

The Enemy Below (1957)

This is as much a psychological thriller as it is a war movie and, as many critics like to note on Mr. Google, the Germans, led by (too old) captain Kurt Jurgens, are NOT cartoonish. His counterpart is Robert Mitchum as the American destroyer captain and the two ships look for an opening—any opening—so that they can kill the other guy. It’s like a Frazier-Ali 15-rounder, but in the middle of the South Atlantic. And Mitchum? I could watch that man butter his toast and get a kick out of it. I can do without the trailer intro/narration by Dick Powell, he of 1935’s Lullaby of Broadway. Lullabye-bye, Powell.

K-19: The Widowmaker

In this 2002 thriller, Harrison Ford is the Russian commander whose accent periodically disappears; Liam Neeson’s is far more reliable. Since Vikings invaded both Russia and Ireland, good on Neeson, whose accent might come from some Viking who invaded both places, too. Maybe Ford can be forgiven, since he was born in Chicago and very few longships were seen on 9th-Century Lake Michigan. But, there you go. When a reactor begins to melt down, the last 2/3 of the film is tragic, of course . Doom doom doom. Collective society may suck, but the film at least shows Soviet sailors willing to give everything to save their crewmates and their submarine. No one can save Ford’s Russian accent; it evidently fell overboard.

Runners Up

The Hunt for Red October: While I am fond of Sean Connery’s spiky hairpiece, the movie goes downhill after he murders Red October‘s political officer, a moment of sudden violence that’s kind of fun. After that. It’s as if the defecting Soviet sub is plowing through maple syrup. And I detest Tom Clancy’s writing. I remain sad that Sean Connery is dead but content because Clancy is. He won’t inflict anymore of his technobabble on us. Red October has a magnetohydrodynamic “caterpillar drive” ANNNNND she’s

Just a little deuce coupe with a flathead mill
But she’ll walk a Thunderbird like she’s standing still
She’s ported and relieved, and she’s stroked and bored
She’ll do a hundred and forty with the top end floored

The only other compelling character is the American sub commander Scott Glenn, who has Balls the Size of Church Bells, a mystery after the tight Wranglers and mechanical bull rides he endured in Urban Cowboy.

Run Silent, Run Deep is based on a pretty good novel I read when I was about thirteen, but since it revolves around a personality clash between one of my favorite actors, Burt Lancaster, as the exec, and his captain, Clark Gable, I am unimpressed. If I want personality clashes, I’ll watch Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). Just stay there. Cool sub, though, but the ones at Disneyland have windows too and you can see mermaids from them. Barbara Eden’s in this film, but she’s in the sub, alas, and not outside combing her mermaid hair with a golden brush while perched on rock, which I would pay good money to see.

Ice Station Zebra: Ice Station Zero.

Operation Petticoat. What a great idea! Let’s trivialize submariners!

BEST RUNNER-UP: Twilight Zone, “The Thirty-Fathom Grave.” Rod Serling was such a talented writer, but I much prefer his ghostie stuff to his Serious Social Stuff. He wrote the script for this episode. An American destroyer’s sonar, in our time (that would be about 1960 in TV time) picks up what sounds like a hammer pounding against metal beneath the surface. Alas, it’s a sunken submarine, and a destroyer sailor and World War II submarine vet, played by an excellent actor, Mike Kellin, suddenly realizes that that was his sub and the pounding comes from his lost crewmates, calling for him to come join them. The ship’s captain, played by Simon Oakland, is quite good, as is John Considine, who explores the wreck (for you Boomer types, Considine brother, Tim, was in My Three Sons. He left the show to college and never returned. I suspect he was crushed to death while telephone-booth* stuffing, popular among college students before they began occupying adminsitration buildings a few years later.

(*Younger people: Use Google Image Search for the term “telephone booth.”)