User reviews

This early movie from the acclaimed director Frank Capra tells the story of two navy friends who fall in love with the same girl. The break up of their friendship over this girl is only saved by a sinking submarine. When the diver of the two saves the other from dying on the submarine they finish their argument and ditch the girl. The story is told with a lot of pace so for a silent film it's really dynamic. Capra also uses the medium in an innovative way, this is clearly visible when he shows us the wish of the girl to be back in the dancing where she used to hangout a lot. Capra shows this by letting a close up of the girls face fade in to a shot of the nightclub. This is an example of a detail which shows that Capra tried to explore new ways of using the film. I suspect that the navy financed this picture because there is a lot of navy display. The original score for this movie, i think, was written by Irving Berlin so if you have the change to catch this movie, dive into it!

My copy of this film has a soundtrack which, apart from the last reel, is not original and not of particularly good quality; in the last few minutes the original music appears and the almost inevitable theme song "Pals, just pals" I found this, in some ways, a daring film, even for the pre-code era. The casual sexual behaviour of the lead characters and the off-hand way in which they accept their fate is, I think, surprising, especially in today's era with our awareness of the dangers of STDs and AIDS. Apart from that, this is a sturdy melodrama which presages "Dirigible", which features the same two male leads and has a similar storyline of male friendship,betrayal and rescue. Strange how some films of this period stray close to an almost homo-erotic portrayal of male friendship -see also "Wings","Robin Hood"-with much bodily contact and lingering looks and the odd chaste kiss-"Wings", Noahs's Ark" The story is strong, especially the scenes inside the submarine, though I wonder how effective the captain's proposed final solution would have been! and had they never heard of conserving their oxygen supply back then? In all, a film worth re-visiting.

This was reportedly Frank Capra's first A-level feature film, and you can see it in the increased number of locations and sets. However, this was the era when even A-level feature films were written in a few weeks, shot in a few weeks, and editing in a few days. If something snuck into the film without anyone noticing, there wasn't enough time to fish it out and find another way around it, and something like that happens here, undermining the film's entire climax making it and one of its characters surprisingly distasteful. Still, Capra's craft is well on display, especially when it comes to managing actors' performances, and Submarine is a serviceable little entertainment from right before the sound era.

Jack (Jack Holt) is a navy diver, and his best friend Bob (Ralph Graves), is his telephone man when Jack goes on his dangerous descents into the sea while sailing on a minesweeper to help clear out wrecks at the bottom of the ocean floor. They josh each other all the time, especially in the way that Bob, clean faced and suave, steals all of Jack's girls from him. They get split up when Bob gets assigned to a submarine, and Jack ends up meeting Bessie (Dorothy Revier) at a club with whom he instantly falls in love with and marries.

Now, the first half of the film or so is not the most compelling portrait of friendship, naval life, or new love I can imagine from the era (John Ford's Men Without Women covers a lot of the same ground and does it a bit better, they in fact share some major plot points), but it's functional. It mostly works when portraying the relationship between Jack and Bob, but they're separated pretty quickly and we get Jack and Bessie instead. Bessie is drastically underwritten, especially since she ends up being a major lynchpin in the story, and I don't think Capra or Dorothy Howell, the writer, give a good accounting of Bessie as a character.

Well, things take their turn when Jack has to go out on maneuvers for a week, leaving Bessie alone right at the same time that Bob comes to San Diego on his own week-long furlough. Bessie, being evil, goes to her nightclub without her wedding ring, lies to Bob about being single, and starts a weeklong affair with him. Bessie can just be a vacuous, unfaithful tramp, but she had also been married to Jack for three months before this, implying that there's something else about her than just needing a good time. The movie gives no more, and we're just left with this thin portrayal of an evil young woman.

Anyway, the problem with the third act starts when Jack comes home, finds out that Bob and Bessie have had their affair, and he breaks off the friendship with Bob. That's fine, and all, but then Bob goes out on maneuvers, his submarine (finally! A submarine!) gets struck accidentally by another ship, ends up at the bottom of four hundred feet of water, and the divers present can't make the trip down while surviving the pressure from that much water. Jack...insists on being out of touch because he's still mad at Bob.

You can see how this creative decision was made and how it seemed to make sense at the time. Jack is angry with Bob, and so Jack won't go to help. The problem is that Bob isn't alone, and Jack knows it. Jack knows there are a couple of dozen other men in that submarine at the bottom of the water that only he has the skills to get to, and he's letting them suffer and potentially die because of a tiff with his best friend. Sure, it was a great betrayal (who to blame gets sorted out later), but he's willing to let dozens of his men at arms die for it. It's a choice that automatically felt wrong to me, and it all seems designed to stretch out the action of the third act as long as possible. The actual action of the third act is tense and well-done, but it's undermined by the narrative framing. And, of course, the boys end up reconciling and casting off Bessie to be best friends all over again.

I should say that this is also the least Frank Capra movie of Capra's young career. There's no big guy vs. Little guy dynamic at play, it's just a love triangle dealing with men in a dangerous profession. It actually ends up feeling more like an early work of Howard Hawks than Frank Capra (though Hawks wouldn't have ended quite this way, nor would Bessie have been this unredeemable).

If it hadn't been for that weird disconnect in Jack's actions late, I wouldn't have been nearly as bothered by the arbitrariness of the extended action of the third act, but that combined with Bessie's underwritten nature makes me think that while Submarine might have been Capra's first shot at a serious budget at Columbia, it was a near miss artistically.

I saw this film as part of Seattle's Paramount Theatre Silent Movie series (augmented by live Wurlitzer organ). Aspects of it (which you'll note if you can find it - I won't ruin it for you) were especially poignant in the light of the (at the time I saw it) Russian Kursk submarine tragedy. It lets you know exactly what the men of the Kursk were going through - no lie. Also notable were aspects of male/female relationships which have (publicly) changed greatly since this film was made (and come around again). If you can rent it, catch it on the telly, or see it in a theatre (best) - DO. Historically perspective drama at its finest.