I don't really understand the politics of The Enemy Below. It's a film about a U.S. Navy captain battling it out with a Nazi submarine captain. Their battle is one of strategy and cleverness, and the two men fight until they are both destroyed, although technically the U.S. Americans win.
And then the two men, like, toast one another and share a cigarette. This doesn't seem related to a kind of shared humanity, though. It seems, instead, as though they share something else – white masculinity, perhaps? I'm opposed to war, and it appears as though the two men at the center of The Enemy Below are also opposed to war. Instead, they both really understand what they're doing as a kind of job. It's their job to kill one another, to try to destroy each other. The film doesn't wave the American flag – it actually doesn't appear in the movie, and neither does the German flag – so this isn't a movie about American exceptionalism or military power. It's rather a jaded view of things.
But, then... the score is rousing and filled with brass and actually feels quite old fashioned. This feels like a late 1950s military movie trapped inside a mid-1940s military movie. Thankfully, Robert Mitchum and Curd Jürgens are both very cool. Mitchum is given none of the film's dumb lines about hope and the future. Those are all given to Russell Collins, who plays the ship's doctor. He dutifully says them, but they ring hollow as Mitchum gives him a withering stare and says only maybe.
In any case, this is a weird movie. It's shot in beautiful Cinescope, but in many ways it needn't be. We're stuck on these two ships and the camera never really pans out for wide shots except for when Mitchum's ship is bombing the hell out of Jürgens. These are The Enemy Below's best moments, and the special effects needed to make them happen are worth the watch, even if its politics are weird.
No comments:
Post a Comment