Operation Pacific (1951)

Who payed the critics

The greatest movie ever made..!

Purely Joyful Movie!

Best movie ever!

Lightly entertaining John Wayne submarine drama.The Pacific Theatre of WW2. Lt Commander Duke Gifford (played by John Wayne) is the Executive Officer of a US Navy submarine, the USS Thunderfish. The submarine fleet, incl the Thunderfish, is suffering from malfunctioning torpedoes. Meanwhile Commander Gifford is also trying to win back his ex-wife...A stereotypical John Wayne movie, i.e. overly gung ho and not that accurate, militarily. Some quite unrealistic battle scenes. The relationship side is mildly interesting but also overly melodramatic and complex. Not all bad though, as long as you don't think too much. The battle scenes are quite exciting and there are some insights into submarine life.

As movies about submarines go - and Hollywood has churned out its share of them - this is no better and no worse than any. If anything it's notable for early appearances by actors who would achieve recognition as the fifties progressed but then fade away despite appearing in notable films - I'm thinking of Martin Milner (Pete Kelly's Blues, Sweet Smell Of Success), William Campbell (Man Without A Star) and Philip Carey who went on to play Phillip Marlowe on TV. It is, of course, Duke Wayne's movie and he carries it well enough with Patricia Neal as the love interest and Ward Bond as mentor/friend. As someone born and bred in the UK I have no idea whether the central plot point of torpedoes that either failed to explode or else did so before reaching the target has any basis in fact but it's reasonable to assume that a major studio such as Warner Bros would employ fact-checkers to deal with such details so that on balance it was probably factual. Whatever it's certainly worth a look.

Duke E. Gifford (John Wayne) is second in command of the USS Thunderfish, a submarine which is firing off torpedoes that either explode too early or never explode at all. It's a dilemma that he'll eventually take up personally. Even more personal is his quest to win back his ex-wife (Patricia Neal), a nurse; but he'll have to win her back from a navy flier who also happens to be his commander's little brother.We know this movie is going to be an eye-roller during the opening scene in which the Thunderfish is transporting two nuns, a baby and a group of orphans who go running past a ludicrously tolerant crew as they're trying to sink a Japanese ship. While the action scenes are good, nearly every human moment in this film is phony; and the few that aren't are thanks to the usual expert performance from Patricia Neal, not from writer-director George Waggner.The special effects and production values in this submarine drama are okay, but occasionally we'll see a cable pulling a torpedo or a night-time sky that has a ceiling and a corner. Max Steiner's score underlines every banality in the script and then underlines it twice more. At one point a crew member laughs at the Hollywood hokum in the Cary Grant film, "Destination Tokyo." If only he could have been out in the audience for his own picture.

If you want to hear skipper John Wayne utter such immortal words as, "Take 'er down!" and "Rig for silent running," this is the movie for you. The story per se is a familiar one to fans of the Duke. There is a conflict between Wayne's commitment to his work in submarines and his commitment to his marriage to nurse Patricia Neal, in another first-rate, non-flamboyant performance. She seems so much more mature than Cdr Wayne, but still in the end comes around to realize that he was right all along, after a senior colleague tears a strip off her and brings her to her senses. The action scenes are rather good -- after a collision with an enemy ship, the foredeck 40 mm. cannon whirls around in its tub because of the impact. Nice touch. There are depth charge attacks, surface actions, heroes sacrificing themselves to save the ship, a rivalry for nurse Neal's affection, rescued aviators, all you'd expect from a submarine movie. Wayne, one regrets to report, was not actually a submarine commander in life off the screen. His career was just beginning to take off in 1941 when the Japanese had the bad taste to interrupt it. He was thirty-four and had two children so was exempt from the draft. He made a half-hearted attempt to gain a commission in the Marine Corps but when that fell through he decided, as he put it, that he'd be of more use to the war effort making movies than picking up butts in some army camp. Another detail worth comment: the submariners themselves were saddled with the Mark XIV torpedo, which ran eleven feet deeper than its setting and whose detonators were crushed on impact. It entered the war with a 50% failure rate. The Bureau of Naval Ordinance consistently rejected the complaints of submariners as unfounded. Otherwise, you see, the bureau would have to admit that it had approved and was manufacturing a defective product. The problem was a simple one to correct (once it was finally acknowledged) but it took several years for the job to get done. And it was accomplished by commercial engineers, not naval crews. Another minor point: I've visited several submarine relics from the period and they're far more cramped than the Duke's Thunderfish. I had trouble squeezing through hatches that Wayne sails through with ease, so I can only conclude that the mock up was built to a larger scale. (I've been told by people who know that my grasp of the torpedo situation at that time is less than comprehensive. I agree.) However, these are minor irritations in an otherwise enjoyable, if shallow, war movie.