![]() Nice mix of external and internal scenes. I dare say that fully 80% of this movie is of this sort of dry, monotonous technical stuff, competently preformed by well-coached actors and filmed with excruciating devotion to the tiniest details (yawn). Extremely interesting nuts-and-bolts stuff for beret-wearing snooty history buffs like me, but dreadfully boring for the average movie watcher. The result is a fascinating study on the technical ins-and-outs of such mundane tasks as how to submerge under depth charge attack, how to surface in rough weather, how to track and torpedo merchant ships, and how to calculate weight distribution changes and buoyancy ratios on the fly. The bad (or just "less positive") comes with the movie's desire to be as realistic as possible, to the point of employing an actual Italian Navy submarine out at sea and making a good portion of the crew extras in the movie. ![]() To describe it in a sentence, it's a movie almost entirely about how the crew of an Italian sub in the brutal days of WWII tried their best to retain their humanity by rescuing the survivors of the ships they sank at sea. And Submarine Attack is pretty unique in a couple of opposing ways. Having never heard of the 1954 Italian production of Submarine Attack before today, I was actually pretty excited to see what an Axis submarine movie made in the early '50s, at a time when WWII ended less than a decade before, could do differently. There are many others of varying degrees of chest-thumping patriotism and pants-shitting submerged terror. Das Boot is an obvious one for its great mix of tension and realism, The Enemy Below and Torpedo Run also do a masterful job at showing just how dangerous it was to sail the unforgiving seas in a metal tube while everyone was trying to kill you. While there are some real stinkers in this genre out there, yes I'm looking at you U-571, there have been a bulky handful of really topnotch films about the Silent Service. Some of you might know that I have a bit of a thing for undersea warfare in general, submarines in particular, and WWII submarine operations in detail, and I surely do enjoy any movie that features any of those things in any combination. Hi all, Nate here for a quickie review of something that's been rattling around my movie box for years.
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