Tonnerre sous l'Atlantique

It's a little known fact that before the handsome Canadian actress Lois Maxwell found her niche as Miss Moneypenny she starred in handful of Italian films. Here she plays the only woman on a submarine full of men; but it's far from the titillation you'd expect and is actually a rather sombre, dreamy film (Nino Rota's score is probably more suited to a film for children) and a careworn Maxwell (who due to dubbing lacks her famously sarcastic voice) is certainly not your standard Hollywood blonde.

Incongruously shot in decidedly metallic Ferraniacolor, the supporting cast offers another surprise in the presence of Earl Cameron (ten years later reunited with Maxwell in 'Thunderball') as a fellow prisoner from Texas.

This Italian movie is only incidentally about life aboard a submarine during the Second World War. It is no epic adventure like the more famous DAS BOOT or RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP. Rather it is a quiet reflective anti-war film about the dilemmas of good human beings trapped by the exigencies and ironies of war. The captain of this submarine, played with stature by Renato Baldini, is a good man, whose sense of humanity is tested to the limit. He rescues from drowning a group of mostly British sailors (including a woman, played by Lois Maxwell). He then, in very Italian fashion, invites them aboard until he can deposit them in the neutral port of Santa Maria in the Azores. The same thing happens with a group of Danish sailors. This time there is no room on board and the survivors must remain perilously on deck and perhaps die if the captain needs to submerge to attack another target. The nicest scene in the movie is the Christmas party on board complete with makeshift Christmas tree, decorations, carols, the exchange of good cheer and words of friendship between rescuers and `captives.' It all comes to a stark halt when the Danish ship is spotted and must be destroyed. The tree, the decorations get cast aside. Without sermonizing, this movie makes its point very effectively, and for that reason is worth seeing. The original title means `The Great Hope.' Its US title was `Submarine Attack.' This is a telling change, in that a `great hope' for peace doesn't sell tickets. The violence implied in the phrase `submarine attack' has more audience clout. Oh, well. The US release was dubbed, rather badly, into English and the synchronization, whenever there is any singing, is fairly dreadful. Nino Rota, who provided the music for many great Fellini films and Coppola's The Godfather movies, scored this one too.

Renato Baldini is the commander of an Italian submarine patrolling the Atlantic. Its orders are to sink enemy ships, both military and mercantile. After he sinks one, he stops to pick up the survivors. The experience affects him, his crew, and the survivors.

There's always something a bit antiwar about a war movie, with its death and destruction. Submarine movies often seem even stronger in this regards, because they usually contain a sequence in which the submarine is trapped helplessly, being depth-bombed. This movie directed by Duilio Coletti avoids that cliche. The submarine is a pure predator and never seems threatened. Instead, we see the humanity of the crew and people rescued, particularly when they are celebrating Christmas, and the momentary happiness is interrupted to sink a merchant ship, Even as the orders are carried efficiently, and the survivors picked up, there is a melancholy air about the entire movie. With Lois Maxwell, Carlo Bellini, and Earl Cameron.

Fairly decent Italian anti-war film. Worth watching on a wet day with a hangover. Dubbing is poor as is cinematography but not bad for it, and seems to have some decent action, in one instance a ship is cut in half.

It is really true that the fraternity between members of different nations in times of war tension provoked memorable moments in such classics like Le Grand Illusion (1937) by Jean Renoir, but the same isn't true for the everyday production throughout the time, provoking much more sentimental equivocal like this one. This film has a notorious absence of balance since his first cartels, an opportunistic tribute to more than 90 Italian submarines that operated in Second World War; it is very ironic that although its pretense worries in create an humanistic approach to a war theme, evidently a genre more linked with destruction and combat, the movie reclaims a tribute to the "submarines", not to the human beings that worked on them. It is the melodramatic logic of feelings that nurtures all the actions in an abstract idealized world.Perhaps through this frame only we could understand the passive way that the 24 Danish men just pray when they are in an imminence of being submerged together with the submarine – the room where they stay isn't free of the effects of submersion. The same could be said for the pathetic and very long scene of Christmas night, as fragile in dramatic terms as the Christmas tree jumped after the back of "normal" routine situation. Anyway this shows how all the events are only subordinated to the imperatives of the (weak) narrative. Even with all involuntarily histrionic plot and acting, with few exceptions like the commander played by Renato Baldini, this movie was certainly a production with a budget above the media of Italian cinema then produced, some perceptible even by the use of color cinematography, something rare at the time.