A cargo ship is sunk by a U-boat in the north Atlantic. To add insult to injury, the U-boat crew takes footage of the survivors huddled in their lifeboat, but when the survivors act defiantly, the U-boat rams the lifeboat, leaving them adrift on what looks like a giant pallet, but is apparently a raft.
The crew subsequently sign on to another cargo ship, the Sea Witch, but at least this one is crossing in a big convoy. 73 ships! Military escort!! What could go wrong? Well, they could run into an entire wolf pack of U-boats. The convoy could receive orders to disperse. The Sea Witch could find itself hounded by the U-boat that sank their last ship. Just a few examples!
Raymond Massey plays the captain of the two cargo ships, with Humphrey Bogart as his first officer. I guess so the captain can be wounded in the latter stages of the film, pushing Bogart into command, where he can come up with a way to trick the U-boat and get some poetic revenge. Bogart's character also punches out a guy in a bar that's blabbing about all the ships he saw leaving the harbor, then marries the lounge singer, but that never goes much of anywhere. Massey's character clearly thinks she's a gold digger, until learning they got married. Then he's OK with it, but there's no payoff beyond that one scene.
There's a handful of the crew that get a lot of lines. A guy who complains all the time, a guy who says there are subs around when his corns hurt, an older guy (Alan Hale) that's had several wives, that sort of thing. They bicker with each other, or with the regular Navy guys who man the ship's guns, and are probably meant to be the comic relief, but they're just kind of annoying.
The cat-and-mouse between the Sea Witch and the U-boat has a lot of twists and turns of fortune, rather than sticking to the formula of the cargo ship trying to dodge torpedoes or anticipate where the next attack will come from. Even when the cargo ship manages an escape via trickery, it's only a temporary reprieve. Likewise, the battle scene when the wolf pack falls upon the convoy is appropriately chaotic. Ships are blowing up, destroyers are dropping depth charges and blowing up subs, there's no sense of where anything is happening in relation to anything else, all the cargo ships are just looking for a way out.
That said, you can feel the movie grind to a halt each time a character has to give an Important Speech. When the guy who complains a lot explains he keeps passing up jobs on convoy ships because he's got a wife, with a kid on the way, the 4th guy in their little group goes into some spiel about whether the guys in Poland or Czechoslovakia were just thinking about staying safe when their countries got invaded. Or something like that. It was so obviously thrown in to appease the War Department - there is no way I believe that character would make that speech - I tuned it out.
There's a few scenes like that in the film, or like the one where the Sea Witch arrives in Halifax to join the convoy and we see how many different countries all the ships are from. Which, yes, it's nice to acknowledge it was a multinational effort to whip the Nazis' asses, but it's not what the movie's about, in terms of the characters or the plot. In those terms, it's about these civilians surviving getting sunk and being willing to go back out there and run the gauntlet again. And in the process, earning a shot at the guys who felt like it wasn't enough to sink them, they had to humiliate and then terrify them.
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