Watch Torpedo Run For Free

People are voting emotionally.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

In 1942, the commander of the submarine USS Grayfish, Barney Doyle (Glenn Ford) commands a motley crew such as : Lt. Jake 'Fuzz' Foley (Dean Jones) , 'Hash' Benson (L.Q. Jones) , Lt. Redley (Robert Hardy) , Lt. Burt Fisher (Paul Picerni) and especially the second-in command Lt. Archer 'Archie' Sloan (Ernest Borgnine) with whom Barney has a special relationship . Doyle is a stiff captain who plans to sink a Japanese carrier . As their main target is the Japanese aircraft Akagi, which led the attack on Pearl Harbor. But there is a freighter in the way , and on board are his wife and child . Doyle is tormented by the fact that his spouse and baby daughter were taken prisoner when the Japanese invaded the Philippines and he has no word from them for almost 10 months . They're really prisoners of the Japs and whom we have grown to love in flashbacks . Shortly after , Barney is overjoyed when reliable sources confirm that they are alive . There was good reason for the Japanese to let him know however : all of the civilians are being transported to Japan . At the end takes place the confrontation and square off in the Pacific Ocean and Tokyo bay . Standards submarine melodramatics about an US submarine that must torpedo a Japanese carrier which holds some of the crews family members . Glenn Ford gives a good acting as an able ship's captain well respected by his men and effective at sea , who pursues the ship that led the attack on Pear Harbour back Tokyo . Although the film relies heavily on the deep relationship between Lt. Cmdr. Barney Doyle/Glenn Ford and Lt. Archer 'Archie' Sloan/Ernest Borgnine . This nail-biter is a tightly-knit drama centered on the relentless sea maneuvers of a sub going after a carrier and vice versa . Sometimes slow , generally worthwhile watching . As a main premise results to be an engaging issue : a ship transporting his family is acting as a shield for the Akagi carrier forcing Doyle to make a terrible decision, as his country comes first and he blows the freighter out of water . The film is known as one of the most famous WWII submarine movies, though some scenes at sea, however, suffer from the utilization of obvious models in a just as obvious studio tank . Secondary cast is frankly good such as : Diane Brewster, Dean Jones , L.Q. Jones , Philip Ober , Richard Carlyle and Robert Hardy . George J. Folsey's colorful and vivid cinematography , including spectacular maritime scenes , set in the Pacific Ocean of World War II ; in fact , this movie's ocean scenes were filmed in the Pacific Ocean. .¨Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) (1958) wishes to thank the Department of Defense and the United States Navy for their assistance in the production of this motion picture."The motion picture was professionally directed by Joseph Pevney who also made other WWII films as ¨Away all boats¨. Pevney shot all kinds of genres as Comedy , Film Noir , Mystery , Drama , such as : ¨Who is the black Dahilia ?¨, ¨The strange door¨, ¨Man of a thousand faces¨, ¨Mysterious Island of beautiful women¨, ¨Cash McCall¨, ¨Tammy and the bachelor¨, ¨Istanbul¨, ¨Because of you¨ and Westerns as ¨Night of Grizzly¨ .This ¨Torpedo run¨ represents one of a select group of a few World War II submarine movies which have won the one single Academy Award in a technical category, that's just only the one Oscar in either special effects or sound editing. These movies include ¨Crash Dive¨ ; ¨Enemy below ¨(57) by Dick Powell with Curt Jurgens, Robert Mitchum , and ¨U-571¨. The non-WW II sub-movie, ¨The Hunt for Red October¨ also won just the one Oscar as did the WW 2 part sub-movie 49th Parallel , but for Best Original Story . Furthermore , other important films about submarine are ¨Run Silent Run Deep¨, ¨Crimson tide¨ by Tony Scott with Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman; ¨K19¨ with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson and the best ¨Das Boot¨ (1982) by Wolfgang Petersen with Jurgen Prochnow .

This is a reasonably well-done tale of a submarine commanded by Glenn Ford, with Ernest Borgnine as his friend and executive officer, during World War II.Ford and Borgnine are called back from the Philippines to Pearl Harbor, leaving Ford's wife and little girl behind. By the time Ford and Borgnine take their boat out, the family has been captured. Ford pursues the big Japanese aircraft carrier, the Shinaru, but it's being deliberately shielded by a transport carrying a thousand captives of the Japanese. The captives include Ford's own family, and he knows it, but he's forced -- against the urgent pleas of Borgnine -- to take a shot at the Shinaru. He misses and sinks the transport instead.This leaves him understandably bitter. He takes his boat directly into Tokyo Bay and takes another shot at the Shinaru. This time his torpedoes are intercepted purposefully by a Japanese destroyer. After this dangerous venture he is barely able to get his boat back to Pearl Harbor, passing out in a tormented sleep for three days.A final attempt at the carrier leads him to Kiska in the Aleutian Islands, which Ford considers a dead end. As well he should. This is late 1942. The Battle of Midway was over. The Japanese still held some territory in the Aleutians but it was practically uncontested. Nobody wanted the Aleutians. There's nothing there but sea lions and bird, and the weather is lousy. There were some bloody encounters in the fog and snow but in the end the Japanese withdrew, perhaps out of boredom.The unlikely prospect of finding a big Japanese carrier there aside, this is pretty well done. It's unsparing in some ways. There are a few flashbacks to the happy times that Ford, his family, and Borgnine spent together, but in the end the wife and little blond girl die. A more traditional ending would have reunited them somehow.The visual effects are effective too. And there is a good deal of tension in the scene in Tokyo Harbor, when Ford is negotiating a mine field. After the final attack on the Shinaru, the submarine is sunk. The majority of the crew escape using aqua lungs and are rescued by a companion boat, but six men are left behind to die. When he's pulled aboard the rescue boat, one of the first things Ford asks is the names of the men who didn't make it -- an admirable touch.Borgnine is a little more humanistic than the skipper. This is a traditional conflict: the sympathetic second-in-command and the stern and by-the-book skipper. At that, Glenn Ford is not just tough, he's almost miraculously indifferent to pain. When they are depth-charged, Ford falls and breaks the bone in his upper arm. The pharmacist's mate puts a small splint over the fracture and Ford carries on -- giving orders, donning his escape gear, floating to the surface -- as if nothing were wrong. I remember meeting a stranger as he emerged, loaded, from a bar and managed to fall down while trying to get into his car. "I think I broke my fibia," he said thickly. And indeed I could feel the grinding of a fractured bone in his shin. By the time the ambulance arrived, it could no longer be said that he was feeling no pain.As a submarine movie, this is no masterpiece but it's above average. Ford is in his minimalist mode, not animated by hatred as in "The Big Heat," but the interpretation is believable enough. There are times when Borgnine seems to be reading his lines from cue cards but he's such a jolly, good-natured guy that it's difficult not to like him. And this is one of the few instances from this period when the inclusion of the hero's romantic interest is justified. Without the corny scenes of his wife an family, we wouldn't be able to understand Ford's character.

Well, I'm a fan of submarine movies. And like the previous poster, I can number many more entertaining efforts.Glenn Ford plays the angst-ridden commander, whilst Ernie Borgnine doubles as his excessively friendly and loyal exec. Their's is a polarity that has become something of a genre cliché. Still, they work well together. The rest of the players also do an adequate job.For me, the star of the show is the huge submarine of the American long-range Pacific fleet - the 'Gato' class. These were whoppers. Even so, the interior still looks a little too roomy to be believable, as most of these early sub movies do. They were also the most successful submarines of WW2 and I'm surprised we don't see them featured more often.Some tactical issues seem extremely hokey. The initial attack on the Japanese aircraft carrier would surely have been initiated from several miles away allowing the sub to position itself on whichever side of the carrier that was not protected by the freighter. As things are, by taking such a reckless action, knowing that the freighter contained some 1400 POW's and civilians, the sub commander was surely liable to a war-crime charge. Add to that his collision with a barrage despite being aware of its proximity, and remaining at periscope depth at low speed when a destroyer was barely a thousand yards away, and you begin to wonder how the skipper ever got his command. He certainly wasn't fit. The speed of the carrier is also quoted as 21knots. So how come the common-or-garden freighter was managing to keep up with it? That vessel would barely have managed half the speed.The Japanese ships are all too clearly models. Not as goofy as those of Preminger's 'In Harm's Way', but it is a post-war movie (1958) more could surely have been done. Worth a watch, but by no means collectible. Britain's 1943 vintage 'We Dive At Dawn' has a great deal more going for it, despite being 15 years older and made on a wartime budget.

Read all of the posted comments pertaining to the movie. Seems some viewers thought the Greyfish was going after a Battleship, but the evasive target was a Japanese Carrier and it looked like a big one. Based on my knowledge of WW II Submarine warfare events, I think it is partially based on some actual events. Also, in response to one commenter's thoughts about Momsen Lungs: This invention was successfully used in October 1944 to bring 8 sailors to the surface from the USS Tang (SS 306) after it sank in 180 feet of water in the East China Sea. I served on submarines in the mid 1950's and used the Momsen lung to ascend 100 feet in a training tank. Two years later the device was abandoned in favor of the so called "blow-and-go" method of free ascent to the surface. I made this ascent in the same training tank from a depth of 50 feet. Like some of the folks that commented on the movie, I too watch all the submarine movies that I can. Seen some of them three or four times. Last comment, there IS info to be found on the Internet pertaining to the Momsen lung.