I don't think any experienced viewer could watch even the first few minutes of this without realizing that it was directed by John Ford. I don't mean just the presence of two of his stock company in the primary roles -- Ken Curtis as the real Captain Gilmore, commanding officer of the submarine Growler in World War II; and Ward Bond as the almost certainly fictional Chief of the Boat, named Quincannon -- but I mean also the mock sternness of authority figures, the highly sentimentalized ritual of leaving the families in Pearl Harbor before the departure for the final patrol.
On leaving his house, Quincannon lines his many children up and issues orders such as, "Don't you go playing with those Air Force kids." "Yes, sir," they pipe up in unison. As the men gently kiss their wives and children before boarding the boat, a Navy band plays the mawkish "Far Away Places." The Growler torpedoes a few Japanese ships. Some of the footage is from the shelling of a Japanese fishing boat that had spotted Halsey's fleet before the Doolittle raid was launched. Later, when the Growler has surfaced for emergency repairs, she's fired on by a destroyer. Captain Gilmore, wound and still on the bridge, orders the boat to be taken down, sacrificing his own life for the safety of the boat. The last scene includes the ritual of the Navy brass addressing the crew at Pearl Harbor and offering succor to Gilmore's widow and children while a Navy chorus sings a hymn.
The scene of Gilmore ordering the dive, which ought to be the dramatic high point, is poorly staged. Gilmore seems to be only a few feet away from Quincannon, who is poised at the still-open hatch, close enough so that a few seconds would have been enough to rescue the captain.
And in fact the whole structure of the film is rather slapdash. The sound is poor and the editing is such that it seems to have been made by a high school kid with an 8 mm. camera. I suppose that's why -- if anything gets skipped in Ford's filmography -- this is it. One hardly hears any reference to it. There's no mistaking the director, but he seems to have been in a great hurry.
