Crash Dive – 1943
The special effects for Crash Dive were top-notch. Not only did they make great use of actual military watercraft, they also had some excellent scale models that allowed for some wonderful effects of massive destruction. At first I thought the film was going to be all about the creepy stalker romance, and a lot of it was. But literally, the last twenty-eight minutes of the one hour and forty-five minute film was devoted to a dangerous and daring military action at a secret Nazi supply base on an island in the ocean.
The film started us out with a great little sequence in which a number of awesome PT boats mount a mission to rescue American crash survivors floating on a raft at sea. They have to defend themselves from a German sub, which the PT boats destroy with apparent ease by dropping depth charges into the water.
But then the movie is dominated by a romantic plot in which Tyrone Power relentlessly and forcefully pursues a woman who begs and pleads with him to leave her alone, just like in The 1942 Best Special Effects nominee, The Black Swan. Fortunately, it is broken up by a really cool action sequence, in which the American submarine, the Corsair, does battle with a German Q-ship. The Q-ship is a heavily armed merchant ship with concealed weaponry, designed to lure submarines into making surface attacks. But after our heroes outsmart the pesky Nazis, we went right back to the ridiculous romance.
But then the plot took a complete left turn and left the love triangle in the dust. The special effects and action in the second half of the movie made up for the slow first half. There were some great shots of the Corsair playing cat and mouse with Nazi vessels, ghosting their trajectories through an underwater minefield. Then after they make it into the base’s waters, a daring land raid, led by Tyrone Power, is carried out to place explosives all over the Nazi installation.
Buildings begin exploding, tommy-guns begin firing, flames begin raining down from the sky, and Nazis begin dying! The American soldiers make a harrowing dash back to the water as the island base erupts in fire and chaos! The Corsair clears the way for their escape, firing torpedoes and disabling the enemy ships. There was even a really cool shot of a Nazi mortar as it hits the Corsair, destroying the periscope. The sub was able to stay afloat, but could no longer dive. Our other hero, played by Dana Andrews, had to remain on the outside to guide the sub as it submerged just enough to avoid being seen by the Nazi soldiers, but not so far that he would be drowned.
It was an exciting sequence that was excellently filmed! The stuntmen and the pyrotechnic technicians really had their work cut out for them and they came through with flying colors. It was an action sequence that was worthy to stand in the company of any other great war movie like The Guns of Navarone or The Dirty Dozen, all very intense dramatized action films with some great special effects!