Mon 11 Jan 2016
A Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: SUBMARINE RAIDER (1942).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , War Films[5] Comments
SUBMARINE RAIDER. Columbia Pictures, 1942. John Howard, Marguerite Chapman, Bruce Bennett, Warren Ashe, Eileen O’Hearn, Philip Ahn, Larry Parks, Forrest Tucker. Director: Lew Landers.
If you can look past the “those treacherous Japanese fifth columnists†angle and production values that leave much to be desired, you may soon find that Submarine Raider is a decent enough flag waver that punches above its low budget weight.
Directed by Lew Landers (along with an un-credited Budd Boetticher), this patriotic programmer is a highly fictionalized dramatization of events leading up to the December 7, 1941, Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. This isn’t Howard Hawks’ Air Force (1943), a film that benefited highly from James Wong Howe’s cinematography. Not even close. But it’s not nearly as much a total clunker as I expected it would turn out to be.
John Howard, who went on to a highly prolific career in television, portrays Commander Chris Warren, a submariner in charge of a vessel that rescues damsel in distress, a surprisingly calm and collected Sue Curry (Marguerite Chapman), from a lifeboat floating along in the Pacific. All was going well enough for Sue and her friends aboard a civilian ship until the Japanese Navy decided to blow them out of the water on their way to Pearl Harbor.
This, of course, is historical nonsense. But it gets the story moving and makes international politics into a personal story. And speaking of personal stories, Commander Warren’s brother, Bill (Warren Ashe), is a government agent in Honolulu investigating Japanese spies. When he gets killed on December 7, it’s gloves off for our intrepid submarine commander protagonist.
Watching Submarine Raider ends up being less an exercise in film appreciation than it is a glance backward in time to an era in which American anxieties about the War in the Pacific remained at an all time high. Look for the scene in which Warren toasts the Japanese Navy: “Bottom’s Up!†It’s all terribly dated, but then again, not every movie was made to speak to timeless, universal themes.
January 11th, 2016 at 9:51 pm
It was a common misconception before and during the war that Japanese American Fifth Columnists betrayed their country and acted as saboteurs — perhaps because some German and Italians did or attempted to. In Hawks AIR FORCE Japanese Fifth Columnists are shown committing sabotage, and I believe there is even a mention of such activity in John Ford’s documentary PEARL HARBOR. It did not happen, it was an urban myth.
The truth is no Japanese American betrayed this country in the war, a fairly remarkable fact considering the camps and mistreatment during the war years.
But they are just movies, and if the plot elements are a bit silly or historically inaccurate it only matters if people are too ignorant to know better. This one sounds like a good war time programmer that has to be taken as a product of when it was made.
I had a friend of Japanese American descent whose favorite movie was DESTINATION TOKYO. When I pointed out there were several racist comments in it, he retorted, “Yeah, but it has Cary Grant and John Garfield in the same movie.” I think he was right, we have to take these for what they were when they were made and not because they aren’t PC today.
January 11th, 2016 at 9:53 pm
John Howard had already had a successful career in both big and small films. Lost Horizon and the Philadelphia Story on the one hand, and a series of Bulldog Drummond pictures for Paramount on the other. During the war he was a big time hero for the United States, something not at all uncommon among the Hollywood crowd.
January 11th, 2016 at 11:24 pm
Re Destination Tokyo. It had, in addition to Garfield and Grant, John Ridgley, Dane Clark and Alan Hale, all there to reassure those of us at home and frightened out of our minds. A not inconsiderable point.
January 12th, 2016 at 5:05 pm
As for AIR FORCE: It was reasonable up until the finale, where the guys in the B-17 almost win the Battle of Midway single-handed. Morale booster? You bet!
January 14th, 2016 at 8:53 pm
I love both DESTINATION and AIR FORCE and DESTINATION fits right on here because Steve Fisher penned the novel it is based on.