1943 – Stand By for Action
I’m having difficulty separating this movie’s overall quality from the caliber of its special effects. Not that I’m trying to make excuses for the film, but it was MGM’s first attempt at a naval war film. The story was just so… so bad. There I said it. The effects themselves, which were a product of the story, were passable, but just barely.
There simply weren’t that many special effects. In an era in which almost every movie that was being made was a war propaganda film, it tried to follow suit with a story that combined The Little Engine That Could with the concept that even old-timers can kick butt with the rest of them. The film was ten minutes shy of two hours. The first forty-five minutes is filled with bad acting and characters that were not likeable, all trying unsuccessfully to get the audience to care about them. There was almost no action, and a few poor rear-projection shots.
Then there was a little sequence in which a Japanese scout plane targets the old ship, the Warren, and drops a few bombs, missing with every shot. But the plane looked like a toy model, and it moved unnaturally through the air, almost as if the toy was strung up on wires, and moved by a clunky crane from off-camera. That being said, I doubt that was how the illusion of the flying plane was accomplished, but either way, the effect just looked really cheap.
After that, we are given one of the movie’s more interesting sequences in which the old ship is asked to power its way through a storm and some choppy waters at high speed. The scale model work was ok, and a few of the wide shots showing the boat crashing through the waves were alright . In this short sequence, we see a few stunt men being tossed around the watery deck, one of whom is almost washed overboard.
But then we are bogged down in ridiculous story that had me rolling my eyes, lasting for another forty minutes. The movie wantonly broke my cardinal rule of movie-making which says that cute for the sake of cute is never cute. Never. The crew rescues a rowboat full of pregnant women and crying babies. No action, just naval officers worrying about women giving birth on board the ship, like expectant fathers in a hospital waiting room, and naked infants crawling around the deck of the war vessel.
Finally in the last ten minutes, there is a naval battle which largely consisted of the Warren creating a smoke screen and playing a slow game of hide and seek with the Japanese battleship. Eventually it came out right in front of them and blew them out of the water in a giant ball of flames, and that was it. Sorry, but when it came to the special effects, this was a case of too little, too late.