Starting with that self-explanatory title, this well liked WWII battle pic, British Navy division, is so all-of-a-piece the sum seems greater than the parts. Stiff upper lip filmmaking for stiff upper lip Navy Brass, an emotionally reserved group playing real war with toy model ships and ocean charts in a secure underground station. Showing only the tiniest of emotional stress fractures, they piece together scraps of secret war info trying to outwit the eponymous Nazi battleship menacing their best ships. With Kenneth More & Dana Wynter manning the table charts and slowly warming to each other thru clipped backstories, this part of the film is irreproachable and a little hackneyed . . . but in a good way. Out at sea, the ship are still models, much bigger models, sometimes superbly effective/sometimes not so much. But never getting in the way of our response to dutiful sailors doing the right thing, even when orders from that underground backroom send them terribly wrong. The only true villain on either side is the hubristic Bismarck Commander, a vainglorious old school German still hungry for proper recognition on his accomplishments in the last war. In a straightforward, rah-rah way, this is all neatly handled, a war pic for the YA crowd. But there’s an honorable place for such an approach. The film was a big break for director Lewis Gilbert who’d soon show style as well as craftsmanship in ALFIE/’66, before going on to helm some of the snazzier James Bond pics for Sean Connery & Roger Moore.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Possibly the best in this cycle of British WWII navy pics: THE CRUEL SEA/’53. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-cruel-sea-1953.html
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