U 13

A sailors-trapped-in-a-sinking-submarine drama: Will they drown? Will the oxygen run out? Will they suffocate from chlorine gas? Will divers get to them in time? And what about that religious fanatic on board? John Ford skillfully ratchets up the tension, but some shaky special effects, unlikely characterizations and broad acting give an uneven effect, compared to later and slicker entertainments like RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP. However, this production has genuine historical value because it shows the difficulties in changing over from silent to sound,: sometimes it's a silent film with sound effects and [tinny] music. Other scenes have dialogue with one character actually speaking while another answers in silent intertitles. Most oddly, sometimes a character starts speaking, then an intertitle shows noticeably different lines, then the character finishes speaking. Not many movies have such a variety of expression.

A submarine strikes another boa and sinks too fast for its crew to escape. Can help reach them in time? And what of Chief Torpedoman Kenneth MacKenna, who is hiding a very nasty secret?

John Ford's very early talkie survives at the Museum of Modern Art, whence copies have leaked, and they are most peculiar copies indeed; DP Joseph August's camerawork is very well preserved, full of smoke and fog, and tricks of the trade he had been plying since he was working for Thomas Ince. But the soundtrack has survived only in bits and pieces, or it was shot as a silent with a few stray lines recorded. The result is another of those incredibly talky silent movies, where every every shot, it seems is punctuated by a long title. The closest you come to well remembered actors are Stu Erwin and J. Farrell MacDonald -- John Wayne is supposed to be present briefly as a radioman, but as usual, I missed him. Still, it is a John Ford movie, which means something to completists, and August's images are beautiful. But I don't know what they would have done with women on the bottom of the ocean.

....don't do it! Although, I do get it was done in ignorance on this occasion. Kenneth MacKenna (Burke) did it whilst captaining a submarine and this led to his submarine's destruction with all life on board lost at sea. Apart from his. He stood trial and was sentenced to death for his misdemeanor. His friend and prosecuting judge Charles Gerrard (Weymouth) put the blame on MacKenna as opposed to the woman (?) and this film begins with both MacKenna and Gerrard turning up in Shanghai. MacKenna is supposed to be dead and Gerrard thinks he has seen a ghost. However, before Gerrard can confirm his sighting, MacKenna sets sail on the China Sea on his next mission. However, things don't go well and the submarine sinks. Gerrard turns up in charge of the rescue mission...

Don't be fooled by the title as there are plenty of women in this film, especially in the beginning sections of shore leave in Shanghai. They sing, dance and entertain the sailors for a price. The majority of the film takes place on the submarine after it sinks and the cast have to battle with mental strength, poisonous fumes, a slight case of water ingress given they are at the bottom of the sea and they only have one oxygen tank which can support them for a few hours. They need divers to find them but they also have a torpedo chute which gets used rather ingeniously. They don't all make it.

The film has the added interest of being in that crossover period to sound and so we get speech title cards, occasional dialogue, silent patches and soundtracked scenes. It's a crazy mix, especially those scenes where a character starts speaking, then we get a title card only to return to the character to finish his dialogue with different words to what we have just been reading. It is always the same gist and it doesn't really matter but it is entertaining to watch. The only point which I couldn't get over was the non-sensical devotion that MacKenna has to this duplicitous woman with whom he had a dalliance. His notion of being a gentleman is rather annoying nonsense.

An American submarine crashes in to a cargo ship off the coast of China and the surviving crew members await rescue

Yeah you've seen this type of movie a few times before . This one is slightly different because it's set in peace time , is directed by John Ford and comes from 1930 which was an era when talkies were making a breakthrough

Actually you have to take onboard as to what films were like in those days. THE JAZZZ SINGER was the first talky but films didn't explode in to full length talkies until a couple of years later and films in the last year of the 1920s often used sound and dialogue as an aural impact aesthetic. In this case MEN WITHOUT WOMEN is somewhat typical featuring a few spoken scenes , sound effects and caption cards featuring dialogue

For the story itself a bunch of men trapped in in a slowly flooding submarine is a movie cliché but to be fair it wouldn't have been in 1930. Narrative wise it also contradicts itself by having a song and dance number featuring a female of the species . As it stands this early John Ford remains interesting for a number of reason including having John Wayne in an uncredited cameo without being any type of masterpiece

John Ford was really good with endings, I'm beginning to realize. It's been obvious that his greatest strength up to this point in his career was bringing in a bunch of different narrative pieces into a singular set piece. The overall strength of the film really depended on the quality of what came before. Oftentimes the films are simply too short for the amount that goes in, but there's a very nice balance to be found in Men Without Women. The opening is very loose, but we get a surprisingly focused situation through the final half of the film that ends really well.

The only existing copy of Men Without Women left is an international edition. Filmed for sound in English, the copy left uses English intertitles (I believe they were recreated decades later) while the original sound is either gone completely or heavily muffled and out of synch with the picture. I was thinking of how the British film system had decided to film two copies of Alfred Hitchcock's Murder!, the German version being titled Mary (similar to the American and Spanish versions of the classic Dracula). It really seems like studios in the early talkie era really had no idea how to release films in markets with different languages. Subtitles would eventually come along, but until then, studios were going in all kinds of directions.

Anyway, the weird way this copy still exists doesn't really negatively affect the film overall too much. It's obvious that it was filmed for sound, and the worst part is when intertitles come up in conversations on film obviously directed for sound, breaking the flow of scenes in more pronounced ways than in naturally silent films.

Anyway, it's the story of a naval crew on a submarine leaving port from China. The first fifteen minutes or so is the crew ending their shore leave. This is the sort of side-character loving stuff that Ford had become well-known for. There are sailors buying vases for their mothers back home, some looking for good times with prostitutes (this was pre-Code), and generally just getting really drunk (again, pre-Code). It's lightly amusing stuff, but it obfuscates who this story is actually about. Our first clue to who the center of this story comes as the sub leaves dock and the captain of a battleship seems to recognize one of the sailors, the chief torpedoman Burke (Kenneth MacKenna). In addition, the character of Albert Price (Frank Albertson) from Salute appears, graduated as an ensign, as the newest member of the crew, coming aboard for his first voyage with the ship.

Something goes wrong very soon after they leave port. The engine room floods, killing everyone there and stalling the ship, keeping it from moving. There's also damage to both torpedo tubes, and the men cannot get off the ship. The bulk of the film is the crew on the submarine's bridge, left with Ensign Price as the senior officer, trying to buy time with their limited oxygen supply while the radio operator sends out S. O. S. Messages. The crew grows increasingly frantic with Burke keeping hold of the oxygen tank, trying to slowly dose out the gas to elongate the crew's ability to survive (I'm not entirely sure how doling it out in small bits would be great for survival, but sure). People go crazy, and one even needs to get shot.

The truth of Burke's past begins to come out at the same time. It turns out that he was a British officer, a captain of a ship that got sunk on a secret mission that, the court marshal determined, was either his fault or the fault of Burke's girl back home in England. He knows that he didn't give up the information, it was probably her. However, because the crown sees him as killed in action, they laid the blame on him. He then took on a new identity of join the American navy. Concurrently, we hear about Ensign Price's girl back home, and how he wants to go back to her.

Time goes on, and a destroyer receives their message and comes to rescue them. However, it is of course the ship captained by the man who could identify Burke's past and take him back to England. The torpedo tube gets cleared, allowing the surviving men to be released from the sub one at a time, but one man will have to stay behind to shoot the second to last man out, doomed to stay and die with the ship. Ensign Price, as the commanding officer, decides that it must be him who stays behind, however, Burke can't go up and not only face his own previous failings of not having gone down with his previous ship but also make it known that his girl back in England is a traitor. It's the kind of perfect little encapsulation of events that the movie rather adeptly builds up to. This conflict of duties in two men bound by duty is really well executed.

The first half is loose and sometimes hard to follow. The second half is clear-eyed and comes to a great conclusion. The health of the existing print means that we'll never see it as originally released in America, but I think it's good enough on its own. It's a solid story of men in the military, a favorite subject of Ford's, and I think it ends up working quite well.