Submarine Seahawk

This movie directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet is only for those searching desperately a time waster at all costs. This is probably the less interesting war films about submarines I have ever seen. Not a crap, because it is a B picture from the late fifties, and I have great tenderness for this period. I don't know any of the characters and I guess poor Spencer Gordon Bennet had great financial issues to direct this. I highly prefer from him the serials he made for Republic Pictures in the forties and his last two movies: BOUNTY KILLER and REQUIEM FOR A GUNFIGHTER. Nothing more to say about this feature.

For once a British actor plays the lead in a cheap Hollywood movie rather than vice versa (playing a Yank, John Bentley's dodgy accent covered by a c.v. including time spent studying at Oxford).

Set in the Pacific in 1944, with the aid of a heroic score by Alexander Laszlo and slickly cut so that the interiors shot by veteran cameraman Gilbert Warrenton well match the library footage (some of it pretty ancient looking) it competently works it's way through the usual friction between the officers followed by enemy mines and a Gung Ho finale; capped by a surprising appearance by the statuesque Marilyn Hanold, soon to shed her uniform as June 1959's Playmate of the Month and later usually cast as bad girls.

Submarine Seahawk is one of those films that you or I could put together with some stock footage and a knowledge of all the clichés involved in making a submarine motion picture.

The U.S.S. Seahawk has a mission and it looks like a suicide one. Under new skipper John Bentley, they're to go into a secret Japanese base and report when the task force is being refitted. Then the Americans are to pull their own Pearl Harbor.

For reasons only the writers know, the purpose of the mission is kept secret from the crew. Why, God only knows, because where's everybody going to go and tell once they're at sea. So the crew is grumbling why they're going out of the way to avoid engaging the enemy.

John Bentley, Brett Halsey and the rest of the no name cast deserve some kind of medal for wading through this tripe and delivering some kind of decent performances. All the clichés involving submarine films are alive and thriving in Submarine Seahawk.

Will they come home from the mission? Watch the film if you dare and care.

When one Lieutenant Commander Paul Turner (John Bentley) unexpectedly gets assigned the lead of the Submarine Seahawk for an important undercover mission (to find out where missing Japanese warships are being hidden), the crew becomes more and more anxious as Turner again and again refuses to fire on enemy ships while taking them further and further into dangerous enemy territory.

This is decent enough entertainment for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon if one is in the mood for a submarine war adventure tale. A couple of familiar faces in the cast doesn't hurt any either nor does some of the early lighter scenes which help us to identify more with the crew.

For an old movie, this movie did not interest me like the World War II movies starring John Wayne. The acting is iffy, there is not much action, and the dialogue is not funny and makes the story even more boring. There are better movies than this out there.