Action In The North Atlantic (1943) It's always a comfort to return to something from the Golden Age of Hollywood.......
........when the big movie studios cranked out beautifully crafted, crowd pleasing movies as fast as Detroit auto makers rolled off cars from the assembly line.
And you could depend on these movies being populated with already legendary actors (the likes of which we've rarely seen again) in the most compelling stories that gripped you from beginning to end.
Okay, maybe we're waxing just a little bit too nostalgic over that era, but it's easy to do when you compare it to some of the current films we've suffered through.
"Action In The North Atlantic", Warner Brothers' stirring tribute the Merchant Marines of World War 2, was rousing war propaganda at its most thrilling.
It needed to be......let's remember that the United States and its allies were fighting for the very survival of Western Civilization and the right to live without the terror and bloody reign of fascist oppression.
To put it bluntly, this nation was fighting the the same kind of evil created by and unleashed by Donald Trump on January 6th of this year.
The film dealt with the harrowing voyages of Merchant Marine ships to deliver desperately needed war weaponry and supplies across the Atlantic to the Allies.......and their spectacular battles with 'wolf packs' of Nazi U-boats who mercilessly hunted these ships with torpedoes.
The captain and first officer of one of the American ships (Raymond Massie, Humphrey Bogart) barely survive one of these submarine attacks during movie's opening, bravura sequence.
This first episode, produced long, long before the dawn of CGI remains one of the most stunning action sequences you'll ever see in a Golden Age Hollywood film, with both actors and stunt people dangerously running around and through actual raging fires.
The sub not only blows up and sinks their ship, it goes out of its way to ram their lifeboat and leaves Bogart, Massey and other crew members clinging to a wooden raft for over a week before they're rescued.
Back on shore before shipping out again, the stalwart Bogart reverts to the Bogie we all know and love......the casual tough guy, romancing a bar singer and discreetly punching out a loudmouth who never heard the phrase "loose lips sink ships'.......
The surviving crew members include a wonderful array of familiar character actors, (Alan Hale, Sam Levene, Dane Clark, Peter Whitney) who never stop their mile-a-minute wisecracking even in the heat of battle.....(says Hale amid the barrage of gunfire and explosions, "If this keeps up, somebody's gonna get hurt....")
These men and their officers all return to sea battles again, this time as part of a massive Allied convoy, but their new ship soon gets separated from the group. And once again they face off in a cat-and-mouse chase with the same sub that first blew them out of the water.......and another furious showdown.
The morale boosting speeches put into the actors' dialogue may seem obvious and simplistic in today's jaded age, but if you think about what was at stake here, the words still ring true to us.
And we didn't even mind the Never Never Land innocence of the way our Russian allies were still depicted in 1943......as the salt-of-the-earth good guys on our side. That, of course, would rapidly come to an end as soon as the war was over.
"Action In The North Atlantic" remains a prime example of why we return to this once-upon-a-time era of movie making.....4 stars (****)
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