Up Periscope

As a kid, I always loved submarine films. As a weapon of war, they aways provided a great vehicle for an adventure - great atmosphere, murky depths and torpedos that seemed very rarely to hit what they were aimed at! Best of all, though, there was positively no room at sea, on the boat, for any slushy romance!! This film opens with James Garner ("Braden") doing his best impression of the beach scene in "From Here to Eternity" (1953) with Andra Martin ("Sally") and my heart sank - yuk, I thought! Yet, no - stick with it. Shortly after all this sand in the swimsuit malarkey and a marriage proposal after knowing each other for a fortnight, he is shipped out to Pearl Harbour and is soon at sea engaged on a perilous top secret mission to photograph some Japanese radio codes. Edmond O'Brien is his captain - the men don't initially hit it off, and Alan Hale Jr ("Malone") is the generally jovial Irish man in the middle trying to keep the peace, and the pace starts to pick up nicely. Garner was better with more comedic roles; he's probably nobody's idea of an hero but he does OK with this. The tension with O"Brien is just too forced, though - we know all along what's going to happen, so why create this extra layer of animosity? Once it's underway (so to speak) it has a fair degree of action and the denouement provides for quite an exciting display of pyrotechnics. Not the best of this genre by a long chalk, but forget the first twenty minutes and it's well worth a watch.