Submarine

Navy deep-sea diver Jack Dorgan and his right-hand man, sailor Bob Mason, are the best of pals. The pair is split up when Bob is transferred to Submarine S-44 in the Pacific Fleet., while Jack remains stationed in California. After a year of boredom, Jack spends a night at the risqué Palais Ballroom and meets Bessie, a free-wheeling gal with a taste for the finer things in life. Immediately besotted, Jack proposes marriage, but within a few months Bessie has already gotten tired of the by-the-books Navy man. When Jack is temporarily reassigned to another location, Bessie heads straight back to the Palais Ballroom - where she meets the freshly returned Bob. The two spend a week together, and when Jack comes back home he cannot believe his best friend has betrayed him. Humiliated, Bob returns to Submarine S-44 - only for it to be struck by a destroyer and sink to the bottom of the ocean. As the air begins to give out, the only man who can save the crew is Jack Dorgan...but does he even want to, knowing that the man who destroyed his marriage - his former best friend - lies slowly dying in the ocean depths?

The success of Paramount's Wings (1927) led to a trend in Hollywood towards military-based tales of male camaraderie with a strong homoerotic undercurrent. Formerly Poverty Row studio Columbia decided to throw their hat in the ring with Submarine, giving it a budget of 0,000, about five times what they spent on an average picture. Enlisted to direct was Irvin Willat, who had made several features with a nautical theme, including Below the Surface (1920) and On the High Seas (1922). However, after three weeks of shooting, studio head Harry Cohn was unhappy with the performances Willat was getting out of leads Jack Holt and Ralph Graves, and replaced him with the relatively untested Frank Capra, who had only made relatively low-budget pictures like That Certain Thing (1927) at Columbia. Capra insisted on scrapping all of Willat's footage and reshooting all of Holt and Graves' scenes without them wearing makeup (a technique that would soon become a Capra trademark.) The concluding underwater rescue was achieved by shooting a toy submarine and a diver in an aquarium in slow motion. Submarine was a success, becoming Columbia's first 'A' picture and establishing them as a major studio. The director's career, too, was similarly affected. "With that picture, Submarine," Capra later said, "I made the leap from the quickies to the program pictures." (1928)

Upplagd i sortimentet: 24 januari, 2025