Run Silent Run Deep (1958)

Link.

Sure has felt like a lot of dull title cards.

Robert Wise had been directing for 14 years by the time of this film, most famously to that time for the film The Day the Earth Stood Still. Of course, later he would obliterate that reputation by first directing the blockbuster (before the term was coined) West Side Story in 1961 and then The Sound of Music in 1965... given those two films, it's hard to imagine his directing a war picture with just two women characters in it. Yes, this is a film literally about sea men. Rim shot.

Unquestionably a cheap joke. I don't mean to disparage the film. Later, films like this would develop a reputation because they legitimately played upon an audience filled with men who had actually participated in the war on submarines, or in some capacity related to submarines or the navy. As such, a raft of such films exploded on the market in the post-war years, with male casts made up of hard, athletic bodies sweating in underwater cans stripped to their t-shirts, feeding a certain cultural phenomenon attached to gay culture in the 1970s.  Steve Reeves was not in this, but it's the kind of film Frankie is talking about in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I'm not disparaging this film for this reason. It is a well-written, restrained, believably designed picture from the outset, with tight framing, careful actor blocking the fits the mood and reality of submarine mechanics, while maintaining a strong, reliable pace and solid elements of tactile, unsettling what-was-it-like for the men aboard these vessels. It's that combination of a film worth seeing and the later social shadow it cast upon other projects that makes the movie important as one in a filmophile's repertoire.

Other sub-films were made before this: more than a dozen in the 1950s before this one was released, most notably The Enemy Below, which had been released the previous year. Wise's picture differed in that he'd obtained an actual sub, the USS Redfish, a Balao-class boat, which provided serious constraints for the film's production given that a good third of the film takes place below deck. The film was also different in that it's the first in which the submariners do not partake in multiple operations divided betwene returns to base, but rather describes a single patrol where radio silence, a continuous threat and separation from what base command might consider important are factors driving the plot. This allows the two officers aboard ship, played by an aging Clark Gable and a troublesome actor of the period Burt Lancaster (in this case, also producing the film), to go at each other on matters of strategy, hierarchy and cowardice with no higher power present. This dynamic would be repeated again and again in other films where militaristic and other hierarchy-driven were deliberately cut off by the plotline in order to rehash the same uncertainties.

All sorts of properties in the 1960s, especially in content made for television, seized upon this argument in a vacuum, with no higher up to clarify who was right or wrong.  Half a dozen Star Trek episodes, cast in space far from Earth, used this very trope, though it was not the only one. My reasons for Star Trek as an example comes from the writers use of Run Silent Run Deep as a textbook happens more than once: first in the Original Series episode, Balance of Terror, in which the Romulans and Federation fight a sub battle in space, then again in The Wrath of Khan. That's not a failing — it's stealing from an original as the sincerest form of flattery.

Whether or not the reader can appreciate the film in and of itself is irrelevant. Wise's practices here would prove fertile for the work of a lot of other people.