Up Periscope

Up Periscope and Down Tools.

Tricky. It's a decent film, lovely to look at with its scope photography and technicolor palettes, James Garner and Edmond O'Brien are holding court in the acting stakes, and of course this being a submarine war film it has the requisite claustrophobic feel. Yet it never really gels as a whole, submerging too far into the mundane to play out a whole bunch of sequences that test the patience of the viewer. There's also the not too small problem of being able to suspend disbelief with the final mission.

Now this is Hollywood and a Warner Brothers film, in 1959, so we don't naturally expect realism in our story telling, in fact we often want incredulity to stir the blood, but this kinda takes the rise too far...

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 photogr...