Hellcats of the Navy -- 1957

So I've never sat down and watched a war movie before, particularly a submarine one. The reason I watched this one is because I realized I'd never seen a Ronald Reagan movie, and this one happens to be the only one to have both Ronald and Nancy Reagan (as Nancy Davis) in it twenty three years before they took over the White House as President and First Lady.

The plot is rather simple. It involves a submarine captain (Ronald Reagan) and his first officer as they navigate their submarine through the waters around Japan during World War II. Early on, the captain is forced to abandon one of his men when a Japanese destroyer starts breathing down their necks and the first officer believes he did it because that person was going out with the captain's ex-girl. The captain insisted that what he did was in the best interest of the ship and crew, but it serves to create that line of tension between them. There's some development as the captain reunites with his girl (Nancy Davis) and he reiterates the reason he didn't want a relationship with her before the war was because he wanted a "wife and children" not a "widow and orphans." Seems reasonable. After a daring move, the captain's sub is blown up and he and his first officer are given another sub to take on a final big mission. They go through it, and we get our inevitable irony before a big happy ending.

While the film sports decent characters and an interesting enough situation, it didn't really have much in the way of outward plot tension. The subject is war, and though we occasionally had the Japanese closing in, we never really felt it. I'm not sure if it was to detach from them, but we only had one image of any Japanese soldiers; the rest was implied or just boats. It never served to really grip us or drag us into the story. It just plodded along and everything continued to work out just fine.

Maybe that was the point. In the end, it felt like a bit of war propaganda even though World War II had been over for 12 years at that point. Maybe it was assurance that we did the right thing. It opened up with an "admiral" voice over explaining the situation and the heroes involved, and closed with titles congratulating those involved. It was actually a bit corny.

So I don't know how realistic a depiction of war it really was. I mean, we did lose a sub as well as some of the men on board, but we never got the emotional impact of that loss, since we never saw any reactions to this other than from Reagan who simply described what happened. But for a film about a conflict, the conflict was limited, and the emotional impact was stifled. I thnk it could have been a lot better if they allowed that part of the story to open up, but maybe that would have been too much for the public to handle at the time. Perhaps so close to the end of the War, people still wanted to feel good about it and minimize their own emotional scars.

I can grant this for the time being, but it destroys any staying power this film ever hoped to have as fifty years after its release, its only claim to fame is the reason I watched it. As a basic film, it only stands as mediocre; not bad, mind you, just mediocre.