Your favourite Maritime Movies

Modeling Subjects Ships
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something like a year ago, we had nice discussions about possibilities to develop more sea or naval themed movies and there were so many brilliant ideas that I enjoyed so much to read. However, I wonder which maritime movies that our forum folk like most. I’ll be happy to hear your favourites and I’m sure I’ll learn many movies that I was not aware yet. Here are my favourites:

Movies about age of sail: Master & Commander hands down. Stunning cinematography, enchanting music, flawless historical accuracy and brilliant acting unites to draw an almost flawless portrait of the life, war and death in a sailing man of war.

Movies about modern navies: Das Boot. Maybe it represents only one (and a very specialist one) type of modern war vessel but it’s an unforgettable experience of thrill and horror of naval war in the machine age.

Movies about pirates and piracy: The 1990 adaptation of R.L Stevenson’s immortal classic “Treasure Island” (starring late Charlton Heston as Long John Silver and a young Christian Bale as Jim Hawkins) is, I think, an exemplarily succesful literary adaptation and the best movie which gives an accurate idea about what kind of people were the pirates in reality. Unlike some ‘pirates of the caribbean’ fighting for personal liberties nonsense, Heston’s adaptation of Treasure Island portrays pirates as they really were: an opportunistic, unreliable and twisted bunch ready to commit murder for pure profit and go rich in the shortest way possible. Another great bonus is the magnificent soundtrack by Chieftains which blows you out if you are a Celtic music freak like me [:D]

Movies about naval fiction: For me, hands down, Walt Disneyp’s 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea. I don’t know how to properly describe the iconic elements in the movie: phenomenon of Harper Goff’s Nautilus, the Giant Squid which is still terrifying after 52 years, James Mason’s portrayal of greatest anti-hero in naval fiction and so on… Ah, and how I can forget Esmie the seal and Whale of a Tale ! [;)] As a sidenote, after my recent re-watching, I realized that Disneyp’s interpretation of the frigate Abraham Lincoln had a more than passing resemblence to USS Hartford except an additional funnel near the stern. No doubt, Jules Verne’s selection of the name “Farragut” as the commander of monster hunting expedition rang a reflexive bell in the minds of Disneyp studios’ designers [:)]

Though it is not a movie but a TV series, BBC’s brilliant The Onedin Line is, I think, the best screen production yet which accurately describes both the mechanism of naval trade during the birth of contemporary world and the life in merchant ships.

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Hands down, the 1937 Captains Courageous. The Grand Banks schooner racing scene will never be seen again. For those who build the Bluenose, Gertrude L. Thebaud, Elsie or Puritan these are the most beautiful sailers we see being depicted in this great film.

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Oh there are so many to choose from that I love in this catagory. “They were Expendable”-early WWII US PT boats fighting a delaying action in the Phillipines, is certainly one of the greats. I also love “Away All Boats”-WWII attack transport ship, “The Hunt for Red October”-Cold War Submarines, “The Final Countdown”-late 70’s aircraft carrier , and “Tora! Tora! Tora!”- Pearl Harbor in most every aspectof the attack, for the modern and WWII era naval themed movies. In addition to “Master and Commander”, " The Bounty" is another age of sail movie that is a pleasure to watch. “The Bedford Incident” is one I want to add to my movie collection, having only seen it once on TV ages ago. Recent movies about man against the sea that were quite watchable were “The Perfect Storm”, and “The Guardian”. You really have to admire the rescue swimmers depicted in both films. And of course, “Forrest Gump’s” Shrimping Boat sequences are unforgettable.

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Das Boot for drama and Yellowbeard for comedy.

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I’ve enjoyed all those already mentioned - especially Captains Courageous (though it has virtually nothing to do with the Kipling story), Master and Commander, and Das Boot.

I’m also a huge fan of The Sand Pebbles. Quite apart from the wonderful shots of the reconstructed 1920s gunboat, I think it established Steve McQueen as a genuine great actor. When people ask me to recommend movies about the American military in general, the first two I mention are Twelve O’Clock High for the officer experience and The Sand Pebbles as a study of what it means to be an enlisted man. Unfortunately The Sand Pebbles seems to be largely forgotten these days. I occasionally have groups of students over to the house to watch history-related movies; I’ve suggested this one several times and none of the students has ever heard of it.

I’ll add a couple more, though they don’t perhaps belong on that exulted level. The Vikings has a hokey plot but some really nice photography of reconstructed Viking ships (and Kirk Douglas and Ernest Borgnine make wonderful Vikings). And a few weeks ago I watched an old (1965) black-and-white WWII movie called Morituri. The story is a somewhat shaky one about the attempted sabotage (by Marlon Brando) of a German freighter carrying a cargo of rubber from the Far East to Europe (and commanded by Yul Brynner). Plot-wise it’s not especially exciting, but it contains some really remarkable interior and exterior footage of an old-time merchant steamer. The photography gets especially interesting when the crew camouflages the ship to look like it has an extra stack and a liner’s superstructure. Somebody involved in the making of that movie knew what he was doing.

The same goes for Juggernaut, in which Richard Harris tries to disarm a series of time bombs planted on board Omar Sharif’s luxury liner. I believe it was filmed on board, of all things, a Russian cruise ship. That one gets consistently high marks from the critics; it also features a very young Anthony Hopkins in a supporting role.

Anybody who likes ocean liner movies needs to see The Last Voyage, with Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. It was made in 1960, long before the rise of modern special effects. The grand old liner Ile de France, which was on her way to the scrap yard, got blown up and almost sunk in the making of the movie.

Others on my short list: Sink the Bismarck, Pursuit of the Graf Spee, and Run Silent, Run Deep. And, though it probably counts more as an aircraft movie, certainly The Bridges at To-Ko-Ri.

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Perhaps my favorite WWII naval movie is “The Enemy Below” about a Buckley Class DE playing “cat and mouse” with a U-Boat. I also like “Sink the Bismarck” and “Tora, Tora, Tora” and “Das Boot”. However, although the story line was good, I did not like “Midway” because they could not get the ships right. As a submariner, I did not like “The Hunt for Red October” because the Soviet boomer was from someone’s fantasy about what a real submarine looked like.

Concerning the days of sail, I like “The Bounty,” “Master and Commander,” the various made for TV “Hornblower” series, and “The Vikings”.

Bill Morrison

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I don’t know why I forgot The Enemy Below earlier; it’s surely on just about everybody’s list of favorites. Another one that I forgot: The Cruel Sea.

I agree completely with Warshipguy about Midway. The writers did a reasonable job of narrating the story, but the ship footage was utterly hokey and the airplanes were almost as bad.

I had almost exactly the opposite reaction to The Bounty. I thought Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson were perfect for the roles of Bligh and Christian, and the ship (if one ignored the white synthetic running rigging and a number of incorrect details) was pretty good. But the script - by no less distinguished a playwright than Robert Bolt, author of A Man For All Seasons, was dreadful. It was full of pointless deviations from the real story (which is extremely well documented) and misused nautical vocabulary.

I did like the Ted Turner-funded TV miniseries Captain James Cook, with Keith Michell. I don’t recall having seen it since it was originally run on cable, close to twenty years ago; I wish it would come out on video. Same goes for the excellent PBS “Masterpiece Theatre” series, The Voyage of Charles Darwin. The ship in that one was pretty bad, but everything else about the production was so good that I didn’t care. (My brother, who’s a zoology professor, also liked it - a rare occasion when our interest overlapped.) That’s another one I’d jump at the chance to buy if it came out on DVD.

I have to confess I’m not a fan of the Hornblower TV series (though I’m one of C.S. Forester’s biggest admirers). I thought the young actor who played Hornblower was superb, the acting in general was excellent, the scenery was nice, the deviations from the plots of the books were silly, and the ships (especially the models) were - well, pretty awful. I was sent a book called Hornblower’s Ships: Their History and Their Models, by Martin Saville, to review for the Nautical Research Journal. Due to budget limitations, the things were built - under Mr. Saville’s supervision - by workers in the former Soviet Union who had never built a ship model before and were willing to work for about $2.00 per day. Whether that exercise constituted exploitation or charity depends, I guess, on one’s viewpoint, but reading about it left me with little taste for the TV shows.

Some years ago I saw a couple of British movies on TV that I haven’t seen since, but would like to. One was called Operation Disaster. The plot concerned a British submarine that, in the late 1940s, collided with an old mine and sank. The rescue team eventually brought up all of the crew except two: the captain, played by John Mills, and a sailor played by an extremely young Richard Attenborough. It was a real nail-biter. The other one, also set in the Cold War, was called Battle Hell. It was the story of H.M.S. Amethyst, a frigate that ran aground in the Yangtze in (I think) 1949, was seized by the Communist Chinese, and became the subject of a long, frustrating series of negotiations until the captain (played by Richard Todd) suddenly fired up the engines in the middle of the night and sneaked out to sea. The movie was filmed on board the Amethyst herself, “with all possible accuracy.” For once that claim seems to have been justified.

And on the subject of British films - we shouldn’t forget In Which We Serve. Given that it was made in 1942, it’s quite astonishing in its believability. It’s a fictionalized version of the story of H.M.S. Kelly, Lord Mountbatten’s command in the Mediterranean. Noel Coward stars as the captain; he also directed, wrote the script, and composed the background music.

I started responding to this post thinking the list of really good ship flicks was pretty short. I’m actually pleasantly surprised at how many we’re coming up with. (I notice nobody’s mentioned Titanic. I guess it actually is a good movie - even a very good one. But I’m so jaded with the story that I just can’t work up much enthusiasm about it any more.)

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I was not aware that such an amount of really old movies about sea and seamanship did exist. Though I think it’s normal that I don’t know them due to my age (don’t take it please gentlemen [:D]) I remember watching Vikings long years ago in the hours well after midnight when TVs do fill their program with -often bad quality copies- of old classics. My recollections are very vague but I remember well a superb scene of assault to a castle. I hope a DVD of restored footage will appear in the near future for a re-examination. I totally agree about The Sand Pebbles, it is a terrific movie, one of the best of “period movie” genre -twilight of the age of imperialism in this case-. It’s a great pity that not a totally satisfying adaptation of Moby Dick do exist. The well known version with Gregory Peck is, despite the talent of the great actor, an extremely uninspired and spiritless one for my taste. In 2003, Hallmark Channel produced it’s own adaptation starring Patrick Stewart as Captain Ahab, as a two episode mini series. It was admirably loyal to the original plot and the focus was to the dialogues and characters which make the novel so canonical in modern english literature. A replica of Bounty was chosen to depict Pequod. The actors who mostly have a theatre background give a really good job but unfortunately the hunt scenes were at best mediocre; thus compromising the book’s excellent balance of adventure excitement and philosophical thinking.

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Captain James Cook, with Keith Michell.

This is available from the Austrailian DVD website, EZYDVD.com

Hope this helps.

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I’ll check out that Captain Cook lead; thanks, Shannonman.

I agree with Kapudan about the two Moby Dick movies. I have a slightly higher opinion of the old Gregory Peck version, but I’m inclined to think that’s a novel that just can’t be filmed satisfactorily.

On late-night TV once I saw an older, even more ridiculous version of Moby Dick, starring John Barrymore. The producers had the nerve to change the plot, to the point where Captain Ahab kills Moby Dick and wins the hand of the leading lady.

On the other hand, another Melville story, Billy Budd, got made into an excellent film, starring Peter Ustinov, Robert Ryan, Melvin Douglas, and Terrence Stamp (in his first role). Ustinov said he regarded that as his most successful movie.

And how could we forget Damn the Defiant? Until Master and Commander came along, that was my favorite sailing warship movie - and I think it still holds up well, with fine acting, an excellent plot, and fine photography. (But who on earth thought up the idea of a cargo boom attached to the mainmast of a British frigate?) The last shot always makes me regret that Alec Guiness never got around to playing Nelson.

Speaking of which - back in the late seventies or very early eighties the BBC did a mini-series called I Remember Nelson. It was aired later on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theatre” in the U.S. There were four parts, each depicting Nelson as seen by one of his close acquaintances: his wife, Sir William Hamilton, Captain Hardy, and a fictitious sailor on board the Victory. The whole series was available briefly on VHS at the time of the Trafalgar bicentennial; I got a copy. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the actor who played Nelson, but he was pretty good. The period details were excellent. The last episode took place entirely on board the Victory. It obviously was shot in a studio, but it must have been a big one; there’s one shot in which the camera pans along the lower gundeck as the guns go off one by one and the space fills up with smoke and noise. Definitely worth watching.

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I’ll second The Cruel Sea. Also, an obscure film, Single Handed aka Sailor of the King. I see it has recently been re-released.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046267/

Fred

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Jtilley gave mention earlier to the Cruel Sea.

This is one of my favourite naval war films, and I think one of the finest of the genre.

Not for its scenes of ‘action’, but as a realistic portrayal of the harsh life on a Flower Class Corvette during the Battle of the Atlantic. The boredom, discomfort, tension and fear are palpable. Das Boot is the closest thing I have seen to it.

Hawkins portrays a decent and sensitive man forced to do things against his nature by circumstance of war. Faced with the choice of pressing home an attack on a U boat sounding or picking up survivors in the immediate vicinity, he launches the depth charge attack with fatal results for those in the water, but without conclusive results from the attack.

At a later point fretting over whether his decision was right he says wearily to his No 1, ‘Its just the war, the bloody war’, the viewer is left in no doubt of the toll that such events take on a man.

Filmed in b&w at a time so shortly after the real event, it has an atmosphere I think it would be hard to recreate today, and for model makers there are some great shots and detail of Flower Class Corvettes.

As an aside the Flower Class Corvettes were got rid of so quickly after the war that when it came to film the Cruel Sea in 1951, they were fortunate to find the former HMS Coreopsis which had been returned by the Greek navy for scrapping.

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How could I have forgotten Damn the Defiant, The Cruel Sea, The Bedford Incident, and Billy Budd?

Bill Morrison

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I think the second film you mention Sailor of the King, was based on the C.S. Forester novel ‘Brown on Resolution’ but which in the book was set during the Great War. The film still crops up on UK TV from time to time.

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Action In the North Atlantic starring Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Massey, Andrew Stone’s The Last Voyage, and The Long Voyage Home starring John Wayne (with a bad Swedish accent). A showing of Action In the North Atlantic used to be shown to plebes during indoc at the US Merchant Marine Academy, but don’t know if it still is.

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I think I remember seeing Sailor of the King on TV many, many years ago. I seem to recall that it starred Jeffrey Hunter and Michael Rennie, but that’s about all I remember about it. I’ll look for it.

After the war C.S. Forester moved to California and made his living for a while writing movie scripts. To my notion only one Forester novel, The African Queen, really worked as a movie. I’ve never been a fan of Gregory Peck’s Captain Horatio Hornblower (for which, I believe, Forester wrote the script), and The Pride and the Passion (based on Forester’s The Gun) is a sorry joke. Forester did write a book that was titled, in the U.S., Sink the Bismarck. I don’t know whether he had anything to do with the movie of that title or not.

Two of my all-time favorite war movies are The Cruel Sea and Twelve O’Clock High. Neither of them has much action in it, both are filmed in black-and-white, and both, to my mind, are truly memorable movies. In those days movie makers had to get along without special effects, and there were harsh limits on the amount of gore that could be shown on the screen. In the first scene of Twelve O’Clock High we see a crew exit a B-17 that’s just crash landed. They, and the flight surgeon, describe the fatal injuries to the pilot, and the semi-elderly group adjutant supervises the removal of the top turret gunner’s arm, wrapped in a blanket. There’s no gore whatsoever, but the scene still packs a wallop. Ditto the one in The Cruel Sea, when the corvette drops the depth charges in the midst of a crowd of swimming British survivors. We see the men in the water, we see the depth charges drop, and we hear them blow up. A crew member on the fantail turns around to the bridge and yells “Bloody murderer.” And a flock of seagulls descends on the ship’s wake. Again, no gore and no special effects. But that one makes just as big an impression on me as anything in Saving Private Ryan.

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Interesting question! I think it depends on whether you are talking about movies that feature good ships, or movies that are good movies that happen to have ships in them. ‘Captain’s Courageous’ is one of my all-time favorites, for the portrayal of the Grand Banks schooners and some great acting by some wondeful actors (who can forget that scene where ‘We’re Here!’ loses her mainmast, and not a CGI special effect in sight!). I also really like the first ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ with the ‘Lady Washington’ doing yeoman service as ‘Interceptor,’ particularly when they do the ‘box-hauling’ trick. I actually was on hand when they were filming this down in the Grenadines, and had no idea what was going on when I came around the point into Walilabou Bay to see the ‘Black Pearl’ wreathed in smoke and firing cannons all over the place! Very goo d acting, very funny moments, and very good ships too! Another film for a good ship is Roman Polanski’s movie ‘Pyrates’ which features a spendid Spanish ship ‘Neptune,’ though the film itself was a bit tedious and had a lousy ending… The orignal ‘Captain Horation Hornblower’ with Gregory Peck has some good shots too, but I agree with most posters that the all-time best for acting, photography and ships is ‘Master & Commander.’

I do think that ‘Moby Dick’ should be re-made with an all-star cast and a huge budget, if only because it could be done so much better these days. And in the lead role of Captain Ahab, I can’t think of anyone better than Clint Eastwood! He has the steely, slightly insane eyes, weather-beaten face and reputation for vengeance that the part really needs…

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OPERATION PETTICOAT

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One of my all time favorite movies let alone maritime films is “Down to the sea in ships” with Lionel Barrymore. It was just on recently on cable, I believe on TCM. This movie gives you a real flavor for what it must have been like to be “takin’ whale”.

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I was serving on USS Lexington in 1975 during the filming of Midway. It was one of the few movies shot with “Sensurround” sound. The opening with the Doolittle Raid was good as it showed actual footage of the B-25 takeoffs, but the rest of the movie was a mishmash of footage taken throughout the Pacific war (the same old clips that you’ve seen a million times) mixed with shots taken on a ship (Lex) that was launched a year after the battle. Then the contrived subplot of the aviator and his Nisei girlfriend just screwed up the whole plot. About the best thing about the movie (for me) was that I got to meet Glenn Ford and Charleton Heston. The sailors in the pilot house were my shipmates of Navigation Division. (I must have been too ugly to make it through the editing room). I did have the opportunity to show the film crew the tiny plaque on the overhead in the flag bridge that marked the spot where Admiral Mitscher gave the order to “Turn on the lights” during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. They really thought that was cool.