West Karana

I was watching some YouTube channel or other that was listing all the most accurate military-themed films ever made. I was expecting things like Tora, Tora, Tora or Das Boot, but neither those nor any others I’d have picked came up. I’ve not been in the military. My daughter was in the Marines, and her pick for the most accurate film, at least regarding basic training, would be Full Metal Jacket, which took place on Parris Island — same place she was trained. Her pick for the most accurate film for her MOS, Military Police, was Super Troopers.

Down Periscope

Neither of those films were on the list, either. Near the top, as a movie that best exemplified life on a submarine in the modern navy, was Down Periscope, the Kelsey Grammer/Rob Schneider vehicle about a washed-up XO (Grammer) who is given a last chance to command a sub by taking a relic boat and performing some impossible tasks in a war game where he is set to fail. Complicating things in his new command are having to have Rob Schneider as his XO, a slovenly crew that apparently doesn’t own any Navy uniforms, and a green woman dive officer with whom Grammer must do double duty teaching to be a competent officer and saving from the crew. Rip Torn plays the friendly admiral, Bruce Dern the evil admiral, Bill Macy the quietly competent commander of the sub Dern commandeers.

So no, this was not a Run Silent, Run Deep. But it sent me on a bit of a tangent watching submarine movies, and then, well, here we are.

Operation Petticoat

I love Cary Grant, but he is wasted in this movie. In Operation Petticoat, a new diesel sub is bombed by Japanese Zeroes before its maiden voyage in the opening days of WWII. Its commander, Grant, is given one chance to repair the sub and join the war in progress, or find his crew scattered and he given a desk job. Navy and Marine bureaucracy means necessary parts are not available. Enter Tony Curtis, an officer in a spotless uniform who never intended to ever see combat, the war becoming a terrible inconvenience to him. He also knows how to obtain anything. Anything.

They are short on the white and red sealants and are forced to mix them to get enough, and the sub is painted pink, with the idea that they will just paint over it in gray. A sudden Japanese attack forces them to leave harbor or be destroyed. The situation gets worse when Tony Curtis offers a new squadron of woman nurses a trip to their new posting.

Hilarity ensues. Cary Grant does the Cary Grant thing of continuous semi-sarcastic patter while Curtis steals the movie every time he is on screen.

Run Silent, Run Deep

I haven’t watched this recently, but I need to mention it. Clark Gable plays a psychotic sub commander who mercilessly drives his men to excellence as he goes on a global vendetta against the mysterious Japanese destroyer that torpedoed his first command. Echoes of Moby Dick and Mutiny on the Bounty, sure, but absolutely compelling, riveting action. Gable may have been fairly old at the time, but the man could act.

Father Goose

While I was watching Operation Petticoat on YouTube, it kept trying to get me watching another Grant comedy, Father Goose, which they insisted was his funniest comedy. In Father Goose, a drunk American is trying to hide from the war in the South Pacific, casually stealing supplies from the nearby Australian naval base when needed. Base commander Trevor Howard tricks Grant into becoming an enemy plane spotter for the Allies by hiding his liquor on the island he is to watch and destroying his boat, leaving him with only a small dinghy. While using the dinghy to go to a neighboring island to retrieve his replacement, he finds his replacement dead and in his cabin, a French schoolteacher and her young students. Forced to return with them to his island, he finds his way back to humanity and love.

I didn’t really find him all that funny in this movie and didn’t finish it. Since Grant is British. and the setting was among the Royal Australian Navy, I’m not sure why they made his character American. Pretty sure Brits can be wayward drunks, too. I think the only two films I’ve seen him in where he plays a Brit was Gunga Din and I Was a Male War Bride. (Wikipedia says he was meant to be French in War Bride, so… just Gunga Din?)

Mister Roberts

Based on the stage play, Henry Fonda plays the titular Roberts, James Cagney plays the cruel captain of the Navy cargo ship that is posted far from the war, and Jack Lemon plays the womanizing ensign who is the source of chaos on the boat. I will never not watch a movie with Fonda in it. Cagney is glorious as the cruel captain, and Lemon is at his efflugient best as the ensign that is so allergic to work — and to seeing the captain — that the captain is unaware he is serving on the ship.

It’s a workplace comedy where the workplace is a ship where nothing much really happens, and it doesn’t stray far from its theater roots, but it is great nonetheless.

Captains Courageous

I hate the name of this movie because it absolutely does nothing to describe what the movie is actually about. It’s based on a book of the same name by Rudyard Kipling, who also wrote the book upon which Gunga Din is based. Kipling, living in Vermont at the time, wanted to write a book about the fishing industry as it existed at the opening years of the last century, and to that end, spent many days around Gloucester and other fishing ports on the New England coast learning everything he could.

In 1923, spoiled rich kid Harvey (played annoyingly by Freddie Bartholomew) manages to bully himself into becoming suspended from his exclusive Connecticut boarding school and is work-focused father is forced to bring him along in his business dealings. Accidentally fallen overboard from a trans-Atlantic steamer, he is rescued by Portuguese fisherman Manuel (a young Spencer Tracy) and brought back to the fishing schooner We’re Here, captained by Captain Disko (Lionel Barrymore) where he meets Disko’s son, a young Mickey Rooney. Over the course of a summer, Manuel teaches Harvey what it is to be a functional human and the fishing trade, and Harvey learns to value something other than money.

Tracy is amazing, and won an Academy Award for this role. Although the plot isn’t terribly original, the acting is amazing. This is set in a time where fishing schooners still relied on wind and sails and stayed out for months at a time, and overfishing hadn’t yet cleaned out the Grand Banks.

I wouldn’t really recommend Father Goose or Down Periscope, but any of these others — you’re probably going to have a good time.