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A Masterpiece!

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

A Gainsborough Picture, made at Gaumont British Studios, Shepherd's Bush. Neither copyrighted nor theatrically released in the U.S.A. Released in the U.K. through General Film Distributors: 28 June 1943. Presented by J. Arthur Rank. London opening at the Odeon, Leicester Square: 20 May 1943. Australian release through 20th Century-Fox: 7 September 1944 (sic). 8,557 feet. 95 minutes. (NTSC available on a VCI DVD; PAL available on a Simply Media DVD or an ITV Silver Collection disc). SYNOPSIS: A British submarine receives orders to sink a Nazi battleship. NOTES: Made with the co-operation of the Admiralty and the officers and men of His Majesty's submarines. The Navy did not think the original Williams-Valentine script "sufficiently authentic", so Launder was engaged. He revised the script with the help of an experienced submarine officer.COMMENT: No greater contrast can be found than that between the war- time propaganda movies made by England and the USA. The Hollywood product is full of false heroics and exaggeratedly racist bravado ("One of us is worth ten of them"), glamorized action and an enormous amount of dame-chasing on leave. The British movies are soberly realistic to a fault (you actually go away from "We Dive At Dawn" with more than a passing knowledge of the interior workings of a submarine); little attempt is made to glamorize war and give it a glossy sheen of high adventure (although there is plenty of tension, war is usually shown in all its horror and futility and mindless waste); whilst the Germans are invariably presented as lacking the quick wits of the English, they are still a force to be taken extremely seriously; and leaves are usually spent quietly with families in environs far removed from high- stepping night clubs.On the other hand, both American and British war pictures usually devote a great deal of their screen time to filling in the characters of a select group of officers and men. Whilst the Hollywood writers often fall back on stereotypes and stock characters, their British counterparts are more successful in presenting a diverse and more interesting range of personnel. The English have never been afraid of eccentrics and non-conformists, whereas to an American scriptwriter, any character who doesn't conform simply has to redeem himself by some heroic act in the final reel. The British certainly believe in team spirit, but the Americans demand total subjection to predetermined rules of conduct."We Dive At Dawn" is an excellent example of the British school. Well-rounded, interesting characters are soberly, and realistically acted by a large group of fine players with whom we can sympathize and identify. A great deal of the action is fascinatingly concerned with the details of submarine command. And the film has been put together with admirable competence and professionalism but without overt flashiness or unrealistic special effects. Asmittedly, "We Dive at Dawn" takes a fair while to get cracking, what with all the boat-side camaraderie as the various characters are introduced. In these early sections of the film we feel too that the two star performances, Portman (top-billed, though his is the subsidiary role) and Mills are somewhat lacking in depth. In fact they both seem too brusque to be totally convincing. However, Mills and Portman do settle down and grow as the story progresses. And some of the other below-decks business, particularly the running gag with the Arabella tattoo, also becomes more enthralling and/or amusing. Of curse, once the action really starts, with its surprising semi- documentary insistence on all the details and actual mechanics of the attack, this movie achieves a realism, a verisimilitude, a naturalistic tautness and tension worthy of Asquith's best work. Even Jack Cox's drab, gray-toned lighting photography comes into its own. Topped by an all-action climax.

Noel Coward's brilliant In Which We Serve set the standard and one year later We Dive At Dawn was a very, very, pale imitation. Taking a lead out of Coward's book Puffin Asquith filmed the crew on shore as well as at sea and attempted to blend the two as seamlessly as the Master but this one suffers badly in comparison with a Classic. I write this an a great admirer of Puffin Asquith but everyone is entitled to an off-day and who's to say it wasn't foisted on him by the powers that be wanted a quick cashing-in on Coward's coat-tails. Had it not been for In Which We Serve this would have been a fairly decent story but when both are freely available - as they are - why settle for light ale when you can have champagne.

The HMS Varangian is a British submarine that is currently in port, with many of the crew arguing over who gets shore leave and who has to man the tub in dock. However, all leave is cancelled whenever the Varangian is ordered to track and destroy German warship The Bardonberg. The journey to find it is dull and uneventful but the confrontation is tense and leaves the submarine struggling below the waves. Despite the moaning and complaining about the submarine life, desperate times call for desperate actions from ordinary men.Although this is a propaganda film in so much as it raises heroic pride among the audience, it is not so jingoistic and simplistic as to lose touch with reality. In this regard, the first half of the film is rather plodding in terms of action as it looks at the characters and the grind of life below the waves. The characters are not strong enough to make us care about their situations early on so it is weak in that aspect, but it is still interesting enough to watch and it is nice to see that they are not all typically "stiff upper lip" sorts. The picture of submarine life is not in that much detail (this is not Das Boot) but again at least the film is realistic in the portrayal of boredom, the risks and also the fact that the submarines were not run by computers and were far from being an exact science. The "battle" is short but still quite tense and the final fight for survival is enjoyable if rather simplistic and lacking anything beyond that of a standard war movie.The cast are mainly good; nobody really works that hard to produce "people" but they mostly avoid the clichés of the British stereotypes. Mills does have a stiff-upper-lip of course but he is also classless (as opposed to, say, the officers in In Which We Serve for example) and he is a likable character. Support is roundly good from people like Bradfield, Millar, Watling and others – it is only really in the final action sequence where the "heroic do-derring" aspect provides a few clunky moments but then those were to be expected and can be forgiven on the whole.Overall, an unspectacular movie perhaps but it manages to be quite enjoyable as a genre film while also avoiding the major problems that can too often come with a wartime propaganda film. People looking for out and out war action, or conversely for a real positive flag-waver will not be satisfied but mostly this does the business for a wet Saturday afternoon in.

It is always pleasant to see John Mills acting but the constraints of wartime mean this is not much more than a propaganda piece – plucky Brits pulling off a near impossible mission. The film quality is good but I had trouble hearing some of the dialog – British accents have changed a lot in 60 years - even for a native speaker.The underwater scenes where the crew is hunted by two German destroyers lacks the tension of later movies – in particular the superlative Das Boot. I was impressed by the calculations for torpedo firing, Mills trying to get angles and his officer working out trajectories on a slide rule. Funny to think they were still using such technology on the Apollo Missions. The special effects are lacking, although the "bathtub" scenes where Mills looks through the periscope are well done as are the real submarine scenes.The film lacks the pace and production values of later (and some earlier) war movies. It has the feeling more of docudrama.