Below the Sea

It's 1917. A German U-boat is sunk with a chest full of gold bars. Survivor Captain Von Boulton pushes the only other survivor off a cliff. He becomes the only one who knows the boat's final resting place. It's 12 years later. The Captain with Lily's financial help tries to recover the gold. It goes badly. A few years later, Von Boulton under the false identity of Schlemmer and diver Steve McCreary (Ralph Bellamy) continue their search for the gold. Scientist Diana Templeton (Fay Wray) is their unwitting funder of the expedition.

This opens with a great battle against a submarine. It always helps to use the real thing. I'm not sure if Lily's ship is necessary. I'd rather get to Fay Wray a lot sooner. The first ship is interesting but all that could be folded into the second ship. As for the underwater filming, it looks like it's done in a water tank. The filmmaking technology is nowhere near modern water-tight cameras. It does look fake and I don't mean just the fake giant octopus. Fay Wray is terrific. I do still wish the underwater scenes could be better but it's as good as it could be for its time.

And what it is is a cheap Columbia B, off the Harry Cohn assembly line, but diverting and exciting in spots. Greedy, amoral Fredrik Vogeding knows where a million dollars' worth of gold bars are hidden below the sea, and he engages heiress Fay Wray and engineer Ralph Bellamy to find it. Bellamy, playing wildly against type (though his milquetoast type hadn't really been established yet), is surly and hard-bitten, yet eventually falls for Wray, in one of those I'm-kissing-you-whether-you-want-it-or-not sequences that happened from time to time in the '30s. There's a tense blown-up-sub sequence, and a tense fight with an octopus, and some underwater photography that's perfectly decent for 1933. And I was impressed with the nastiness of Vogeding, whom I wasn't familiar with at all.

Expert deep sea diver Ralph Bellamy is hired by German sailor Fredrik Vogeding and shady seaside hotel proprietor Esther Howard to help locate and bring up a cache of WWI gold bars from the bottom of the sea. Vogeding has the map; Howard finances the plan; and Bellamy will do the diving.

Ralph Bellamy scowls his way through most of this watery adventure. As the "best diver there is," he is marginally more honest than his two partners, who immediately begin making plans to double cross him and each other. The partnership grows darker and bleaker the longer the two men work together: "I used to figure all the things I'd do with that gold," Bellamy tells Vogeding. "But now it only means one thing to me, Schlemmer. Gettin' rid of you."

The plot thickens when the trio wind up on a scientific expedition financed by rich girl Fay Wray. Noticing that Bellamy never smiles, Wray of course is smitten with him, and the sparring between this pair begins. Finally he embraces her and kisses her, then is shocked when she likes it. Wray: "I suppose you would have liked it better if I'd slapped your face." Bellamy: "Yeah, I would." She slaps his face. He smiles. Wray: "Good heavens! You do know how to smile!"

Some of this dialog is kind of nauseating but it doesn't seem necessary to take it too seriously. Fay Wray looks beautiful but out of place on a heavy duty marine expedition; Ralph Bellamy looks good too but isn't completely convincing as a hard boiled sailor. However, if the dramatic bits are shaky, the adventure scenes really are exciting: a big ocean storm early in the picture is impressively loud and wet, and the climactic rescue attempt at the bottom of the sea is exactly where the whole picture was headed but thrilling just the same.

Pretty silly but lots of fun. And the moment right near the end when Bellamy grabs the binoculars and has a look--that is a brilliant twist.

Somewhere, somehow, somebody decided that Ralph Bellamy was perfect to play the sort of role that would have suited Humphrey Bogart or maybe Robert Mitchum in a later era. So there he is, trying to come off as a cynical tough guy, a professional diver, who signs on for an undersea expedition financed by society playgirl Fay Wray. What he doesn't know is that the captain of their ship isn't searching for exotic marine life but a cache of gold from a sunken U-boat. It's a standard grade-B actioner, down to a fight to the death with a prop octopus. But watching the easy-going, erudite Bellamy desperately trying to play a hard-boiled adventurer is worth tuning in for.

Having made it a point to see all the available Fay Wray films that have survived, I can tell you with certainty that you will never see her looking more beautiful than in her role, here. A radiant presence in a world of dangerous characters, she plays a moneyed adventuress bankrolling a 'scientific' expedition to document marine life. Unknown to her is the real purpose of her crews' intentions. Surprises abound in this 'A' title from Columbia Pictures. I had a hard time telling the full scale from the miniature set. And for humor, Fay lectures Ralph Bellamy about becoming a gentleman, as he descends a ladder, and she'll lean WAAYY over to make sure she has his attention. Another delight from the pre-code era. Highly recommended.