Submarine movies

Yesterday at the Women's Welsh Club of Baltimore's Christmas luncheon, the conversation at our end of the table (Diane, Mary, my mom, Craig, Ilse and me) turned to movies. When Ilse and I discovered that both our dads had worked on noise reduction in submarines back in the Cold War years, we got started on submarine movies, which led Mary to remark that she had no idea there were that many movies about submarines.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Crash Dive (1943) with Tyrone Power, Dana Andrews and Anne Baxter
There's a scene where Anne Baxter watches the boat move down the river that was filmed on a hillside in a residential area just above the sub base in Groton. One of our friends had the same view from her backyard. Beyond that, it's a good story with characters we can care about, which is what I want in a movie.

Das Boot (1981) German film
This is a gripping depiction of life on a German u-boat, which was no picnic. Again, a good story and we care about these guys.

Destination Tokyo (1943) with Cary Grant and John Garfield
This one is about a sub on a secret mission to support the Doolittle Raid.

The Enemy Below (1957) with Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens
Mitchum and Jurgens play the captains of an American destroyer and German u-boat who find themselves lone enemies in the South Atlantic during WWII. The ensuing game of cat and mouse is fascinating to watch, and ultimately says a lot about the human spirit. This is my personal favorite. It's based on a novel of the same title, although the destroyer in the novel was British. The movie also won the 1958 Oscar for best special effects.

Operation Pacific (1951) with John Wayne
This one incorporates some nice historical details, including technical problems with torpedoes and the heroism of some real sub officers.

Operation Petticoat (1959) with Cary Grant, Tony Curtis and Dina Merril, directed by Blake Edwards
The name Blake Edwards is a dead giveaway that this is a comedy, although with serious moments. The plot involves taking aboard some nurses in distress and a shortage of red lead undercoat paint, and that's all I'm going to say about that.

Run Silent, Run Deep (1958) with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster
This one is based loosely on an Ed Beach novel of the same title, but also has some parallels with "Moby Dick."

Torpedo Run (1958) with Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine
Another story about a skipper obsessed with sinking a particular ship, in this case one of the carriers from the Pearl Harbor raid. I think this is the movie with a scene of the sub following a Japanese ship through the sub net and minefield into Tokyo Bay. It got an Oscar nomination for special effects.

Up Periscope (1959) with James Garner and Edmond O'Brien
James Garner is a frogman whose team is landed by sub. It's based on a novel by Robb White.

The Hunt for Red October (1990) with Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin
Based on Tom Clancy's popular first novel, the movie lives up to the book. Won the 1991 Oscar for Sound Editing. Trivia: Tom Clancy grew up in Towson, and his family was in same parish as Johnny Unitas and family. Clancy made the Soviet skipper Lithuanian as a kind of tribute to Unitas, whose family was also Lithuanian.

Down Periscope (1996) with Kelsey Grammar
This one is another comedy with serious moments. There are some moments that spoof other sub movies. Overall, a good popcorn movie.

Now that I look at the list (admittedly incomplete; there are sci-fi sub movies that I didn't include, for example), it looks like just about every Hollywood leading man in the 1940s and '50s was in a submarine movie. I wonder if they were as much fun to make as they are to watch.