Reviews

A posh school that makes a big show of its moral codes, and party girl students like Ginger Rogers: there's a genre expectation here of a comedy pitting those two elements against each other - plucky students, goody two shoes students, stuffy teachers, cheeky classroom answers, flashlights under blankets, dormitory windows with trellises or trees to facilitate sneaking in/out. This isn't what the film is, although it plays with those expectations.

For a start, it turns out that the institution and the party girls get on fine with each other. Rogers' character sees through the institution's preaching as a front for the "genteel racketeering" of extracting exorbitant fees from rich parents, and she understands that the school doesn't care what she does (or what sort of risks she runs) as long as she's sneaky about it and keeps up appearances.

This comfortable arrangement is disturbed by Frances Dee, whose moral code the other characters find hard to categorise because it doesn't seem to forbid any particular behaviour or make a big thing about how moral it is - instead it's something along the lines of being true to oneself and living up to one's commitments.

Both the institution and the party girls mistake her initially for a goody-two-shoes, so the institution approves and the party girls like Rogers disapprove. As the film develops, Rogers recognises that Dee's moral code is something to be admired and relied on, and Dee breaks the false dichotomy between a party girl and a goody two shoes by being curious, open minded, and willing to try anything once, but defining her own boundaries and being assertive about maintaining them. This independence soon enough confuses and confounds the school authorities, who crack down aggressively and vindictively on her attempts to find her own happiness.

The best thing about the film is Frances Dee, who projects a sense of poise, patience, and decorum that's appropriate to the role (then again, some of the impression of poise and patience is probably accounted for by the fact that she's a timeless beauty who one doesn't feel in any hurry to look away from). The earnestness of her character can be tiring to watch - she's a serious, thoughtful young lady who meets a serious, thoughtful young man, and they have a serious, thoughtful relationship. Perhaps more could have been made of Rogers' character for cheekiness and dancing and comic relief, but that may say more about my own expectations for the film. My surprise at the twist the film took can probably also be attributed to my own expectations of the film and the character - thinking about it in retrospect, it's almost true by definition that serious, thoughtful people who follow their own moral codes are likely to do things that defy one's expectations - it's known as freedom.

Because everyone is rich, it's harder to symphatise with their troubles (one wonders what Depression audiences made of being expected to feel sorry for the poor lonely girl who gets a $1000 cheque and a $2500 mink coat for Christmas instead of the company of her vacuous parents), and it requires suspension of disbelief not to expect that whatever trouble they get into, they'll be gotten out of it.

Some of the commenters mention some ambiguity in the way the film gets a certain subject past the censors, but it's clear that the filmmakers didn't intend any ambiguity and that an adult audience of the time, familiar with the conventions, wouldn't have had any hesitations or doubts in understanding what was going on.

It would be over the top to characterise the film as making any grand statements, but its observations about institutional codes and "genteel racketeering" are quite accurate and apply to more than fictional finishing schools - in a scene that hasn't dated at all, Dee's character is brusquely dismissed from a posh soiree for failing to pretend not to notice that the person she is being introduced to is a family member of a white collar criminal.

Whether the target is an enemy ship or their common love interest, Tyrone Power's character always goes straight for the kill, and Dana Andrews' character tries to think a couple of moves ahead. Both of them are quite believable and watchable in those roles: Power's charm is obvious, and Andrews has a way of being outwardly undemonstrative but somehow putting across the impression of a lot going on inside.

One expects of a submarine film that the drama will come from claustrophobia, that these two men will come to know that they're both after the same woman, and immediately afterwards they're going to be sealed into a metal box and put under the sea. This isn't really the case: the claustrophobia is never very sustained, there's nothing particularly submariney about the movie - without too much change to the script it could have been Tyrone Power and Dana Andrews in a seaplane, or in a tank. In fact, I'm not even sure if there's anything very submariney about the actions of the submarine: if a real life submarine had stumbled upon a secret enemy base, surely the thing to do would have been to radio its position to the nearest battleship fleet or bomber base. What it actually did seemed to be more out of a James Bond film.

Oh yes, forgot about Anne Baxter for a while there. This is the problem: the film is either in girl-chasing mode, with the characters going on country drives, or in ship-chasing mode, where the girl can't be any part of the action. Similarly, the male characters are either in friend mode, when the call each other by their first names and offer each other cigarettes, or not friend mode, when they address each other by their formal titles and don't share cigarettes.

The movie is slow to get started, since it has to establish both the sea action and the shore action, and this isn't helped by a prologue with Tyrone Power at action not in a submarine but in a PT boat. There's a possible dramatic justification for this in that Power's character is meant to be more suited to armed speedboat manouevres than to the patience and coolness of submarine warfare, and it establishes Power as an interloper in Andrews' world. But the epilogue spoken by Power is less about submariners doing a great job and more about all branches of the navy having an essential part to play, and I assume that was the specific message that the propaganda officials wanted to get into the film. So I wonder if the business about Power being a PT boat man was in order to set up this propaganda message of all branches pulling together.

It's a film set among night people in a London still struggling to get on its feet after the war. There's a lot of location shooting and attention to detail in showing the world the characters live in: characters put flowers in their lapels but live in draughty rooms, a nightclub tries to look classy but has beggars and alcoholics buzzing around it, the neon lights are shining again in the West End but it isn't very far to whole city blocks where nearly a decade after the Blitz the rubble has still to be cleared.

When the scene is set so well, it's entirely believable to come across characters who are desperate to escape from their lives, and it doesn't take a lot of explicit violence to be aware that there are a lot of people here who would cut your throat for tuppence ha'penny, let alone a thousand quid, or is that a thousand quids (one of the fun parts of the film is listening to American actors use British slang).

In fact the milieu is drawn so well that not only does it bring you into the movie but it sometimes becomes more interesting than the movie itself. For example one of the characters is a craggy old-time wrestler who is played by a real-life craggy old-time wrestler in his only acting role. He has a fight whose outcome is essential to the plot but where the irresitible forces and immovable objects in human form are so fascinating that when we see the reaction of the other characters, they're partly reacting as their characters would react and it's partly as if the actors have stepped out of the movie for two minutes and are reacting to the scene with the audience.