“Action in the North Atlantic” (Warner Brothers) is an overdue tribute to the fighting merchant marine of this war, one of the series “in praise of a branch of the service” which is based on action and wisecracks and expresses nothing at all. The action is piled up in great layers. In a Warners’ picture it becomes of supreme importance. The ship is blown up for the sight it makes and for the jazzing it gives the plot. So when one ship is blown up, six or seven follow it, and then six or seven submarines get theirs. The action is emotionless because it is without order, pace or rhythm, because the people concerned in it are so utterly alike, and characterless, and because bombs and killing cease at a certain point to concern human beings and become mere spectacles. Yet, this is one of the more efficient versions of the action-wisecrack formula. It moves right along without a hitch, the audience waits for each line of dialogue to turn up its laugh, the action is the last word in technical verisimilitude—they have learned to make like a newsreel with the photography.
There is no mood nor personality of the sea, of being on it, in it or of it. If the merchant seaman finds a kind of security off land that he doesn’t find on it, if he is surly and boastful of his ability, if his living quarters on the ship are any different in feeling from those in the locker room at the Athletic Club, if the engineer differs from the mate and if either of them differs from the airmen in “Air Force” or the marines in “Wake Island” or the sailors in “Crash Dive,” there is nothing in this movie to indicate it. It is lacking in character, because our war movies are plagued with a Boy-Scoutish conscientiousness that makes them hopelessly good and hopelessly bad, and eats them out of body and soul. They must answer first to God, country, American mothers, the producer, the recruiting branch of the merchant marine, people who come to see Bogart knock someone’s teeth in, people who come for laughs, for action, for love, etc., and they never get a second chance to be warm, human or anything real. In deference to seamen, Bogart goes to the first saloon and blonde that he sees; but when he walks out of the bedroom door in the next scene he must, for American mothers, I suppose be married and a loving husband forever after. If the mate gripes, traditionally, about the food on board, it must be hurriedly pointed out, for the recruiting service, I suppose, that the mate may be out of sorts that morning. It hardly seems possible that Pulaski, six years an A.B., would aspire to wear a cadet’s cap, but it is presumably desirable to show that seamen move up the ladder to success.
As a result of the movie’s double duty of citizenship and entertainment, everybody on board gets terribly articulate. It is not the articulate felicity of workmen about the bungling of their superiors, their own facility with their work and their women, the wonders of every job but the one they’re on. Nor is it the symbolical volubility of an O’Neill character. This is talking to keep you laughing, and everyone from God to a Liberty Ship happy.
The visual incuriosity of this film is amazing. The implication is that the field the camera covers is so barren that it must be artificially blown up. It is typical that the union-hall sequence is taken up entirely with Pulaski’s shouting at the top of his voice that he either is or isn’t a coward, and someone’s tearing his union button off and putting it back on again. Here, where a completely male world runs over in poker, pool and talk, and the phrase “brotherhood of man” is inherently present to an overwhelming degree, where seamen are as serious about their card games as anyone else, the movie relies on moom-pitcher drayma. The inner world of a ship and the men’s duties on board are confined to an occasional wheel rotating and talkative watches. Half of the visual power of any image is in the differentiated appearance of the players—such as the lean, open-faced quality that makes Henry Fonda a working stiff before the story-writer has even put pencil to paper. But “Action in the North Atlantic” is so unconcerned with character as seen, that you could reshuffle all the characters and nothing would be gained or lost. The one interest, visually, of movies of this kind is the violent-action image; they do it well, and it moves right along from one spectacle to another with that smooth-surfaced vitality which is always interesting, and which gives you everything but human beings—the loneliness, and clear joy of it, the suffering and the complete excitement of sea life.
June 14, 1943