THE FROGMEN (1951)

Dandy & unpretentious, this WWII sea action pic remains damn effective, helped rather than hurt by journeyman director Lloyd Bacon’s usual lack of imagination.  His just-the-facts style of filmmaking reportage on the mark in making the insanely dangerous operations of UDT-4, the Underwater Demolition Team (a sort of proto-Navy SEALs unit) believable.  Assignments include advance surveillance of battle sites; charting mines & shoreline obstacles; taking out beachfront ordnance), all accomplished with equipment that’s not so much primitive as nonexistent (swimming trunks, scuba masks, waterproof writing mini-tablets; that’s about it).  Richard Widmark the replacement commander who can’t bond with his loyal-to-a-fault unit; Dana Andrews the older top-man, bending rules for popularity; Gary Merrill the seen-it-all transport ship Captain; Jeffery Hunter the young family man (who of course will be the one guy seriously wounded); and Robert Wagner (with equal billing to Hunter) left largely on the cutting room floor.  (Uncredited Jack Warden has more screen time.)  There’s some extraneous melodrama (an unexploded torpedo gets stuck in the ship’s sick bay), but all the quotidian techniques & duties of the job are both fascinating and horrifically scary/difficult.  The system for picking up the men after they’ve completed an assignment a hair-raising variation of the old moving train/mailbag hook grab, but with men as mailbags (Yikes!) and a human ‘hook’ using a noosed rope the men must catch and hang on to while the boat is moving at speed.  None of this faked.  Lots more in this vein, all leading up to a major op, now with oxygen tanks, taking out a ‘pen’ of Jap subs.  The whole film modest, stoic, underplayed, and nearly hoke-free.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  It’s always a shock to see real WWII footage where the fighting men were more like fighting boys (late teens to early 20s; 25 made you the unit’s ‘old man’).  Hollywood films had them all a decade older.  And it only got worse as war memories (and war footage) faded.  Here, Dana Andrews is the old timer at 41, but in general, this film casts a bit closer to the age mark.  Perhaps because they spend so much time wearing nothing but swimming trunks, you really needed to be in shape and younger actors were the ones in fighting trim.