The Men Who Defeated The U-Boats

Northern Advocate, 15 July 1939, Page 3 (Supplement)

The Men Who Defeated The U-Boats

Wooden ships and iron men were the old prescription for a successful navy. And .they still are the prescription for a successful movie, as reports from Hollywood on “Submarine Patrol” indicate. The combination spells action, and action is what producers and audiences alike are after in their pictures.

them were inexperienced, greenhorn crews, with nothing but their nerve and patriotism to recommend them as seamen. These small vessels and their crews were the “step children of the navy,” yet they wrote the most glorious pages of the navy’s history during the war. And now, with the naval programme being expanded, they are once again coming into their own and pictures about them and their exploits in the powder keg of the Adriatic are front page news.

For “Submarine Patrol,” Chris did so well that when Lieutenant-Valentine Wood, U.S.N. (retired) stepped aboard one of his submarine chasers, he was speechless for a moment, then broke into a grin and said, “Why this looks just like home.” The interior and exterior of the submarine Chris made were likewise marvels of accurate reproduction. The studio found that out when one of the bit players, the man who had been assigned the role of captain of the vessel, came on the subma-

rine set ,and broke into a torrent of German, the general gist of which was “Wonderful!” It seems that the man had been a U-boat commander during the war, and to him as to Lieutenant Wood, the scenery looked like home. Can’t Paint Seadogs

Actually, as the picture itself brings out, the days of wooden ships and iron men are not so long gone by as people might suppose. The conjunction of the two was operative during the Great War with great effectiveness, although that’s a phase of naval history people haven’t heard much about heretofore. The story of the exploits of the submarine chasers and their

What makes the timeliness of “Submarine Patrol” all the more impressive is the fact that the basic idea of the picture was conceived three years ago, and all of the intervening time has been devoted to preparation.

strange inexperienced crews was packed with thrills, just beginning to be put on the screen. There was

The one ship in the picture which Chris didn't make was a McCormick Line freighter, which did duty as a munitions ship in the picture. Her crew also turned actors for their period of filming, but they accepted their change of status with reservations. They balked at wearing greasepaint. “You can paint the ship,” said a husky bosun who acted as spokesman for the crew, “but you can’t paint us.” So the ship was spectacularly camouflaged, but the sailors were not.

The fact that every big producing company has a large research staff, and the fact' that these staffs are valuable is so generally known as to need no comment. No big picture is made without a thorough background of research, and in the case of “Submarine Patrol” a large part of the time spent between the original concept and the completed picture went into making sure that every image on the screen was authentic. When the studio research workers had collected all their data, it was turned over to the navy for double checking.

With official okay on every scene and every character, the preliminaries of production were started. First there was the matter of buildnig a fleet of submarine chasers and a submarine for them to chase. This task was, of course, left in the able hands of Chris. Christensen. Hollywood’s ace boat builder. Chris has built more than a hundred ships for pictures; everything from a felucca to an eighteenth century man-o-war for movies, but for the first time he was called on to build a vessel that would float. Heretofore his ships were accurate in every detail but one, and that one the rather important item of the bottom.

Big and involved as was the task that confronted Christensen, his sub chasers and U-boat represented no more skilled and painstaking effort than did the other sets created for the picture. The largest and most spectacular was the Brooklyn navy yard. From pierhead to drydock to towering crane to railway to administration building, the cinematic replicas of the wartime yard was complete in every detail. The lofty cage masts of the dreadnought of those days soared as part of the skyline. A switching engine dragging a string of flat cars snorted on its way and a thousand bluejackets drilled, scrubbed and relaxed.

Good Old Days The district around the navy yard—that pungent bit, of Port Said transplanted to sedate Brooklyn—was also reproduced in all its riotous colour. So complete was the realism that, in colour and size, even the brewery horses, which in those days added their majestic clomp-clomp to the raucous .cacophony of Sands Street, were duplicated. Fifty-five automobiles, trucks and cars of 1917 and earlier tfere rounded up and used in street scenes. Actually Nancy Kelly and Richard Greene, the two young players in “Submarine Patrol” can’t be called absolute

Their Heroic Story Revealed in the Film “Submarine Patrol”

newcomers. Greene established himself with his work in “Four Men and a Prayer” and “My Lucky Star,” and Nancy Kelly, although she’s only a bit more than seventeen years old. is a veteran of the stage and the radio. Greene was summoned from London in the midst of a successful run in the stage production of “French Without Tears” and Nancy Kelly was called from New York, following the critical acclaim she received in “Susan and God.”

The cast also includes Preston Foster and George Bancroft, two leading men in their own rights. Selecting Bancroft was a particularly happy bit of casting, for that husky gentleman has made his own contribution to actual as well as cinematic naval history. Bancroft served on an American warship during the battle of Manila as an enlisted

man and later was decorated for div-' *ing beneath the U.S.S. Oregon to learn the damage to that vessel when she ran on a reef in the China Sea. He then went to Annapolis and made a name for himself at the naval academy. . Twenty-Five Year Veterans Sharing with Bancroft the honours for length of cinematic service are Slim Summerville and J. Farrell MacDonald. These three each celebrated his twenty-fifth year in pictures during the filming of “Submarine Patrol.” And Miss Kelly and Greene lost no time getting together with the oldtimers to hear their yarns of the wild and woolly days of picture making. As_ befitted any movie dealing with the iron men who sailed in wooden ships, the cast of the current 20th Cen-tury-Fox film demanded the services of all the huskies of the film colony that could be rounded up; people like Warren Hymer, Douglas Fowley, Maxie Rosenbloom, Jack Pennick and a hundred members of his “private army” —which became a navy for the duration of the picture—Ward Bond, Dick Hogan and John Carrodine. “And maybe you don’t think riding herd on those fellows was something.” Director Ford says. “Every time we had a scene that called for rough and tumble work, the trouble was not in getting it started, but in getting them to stop. It kept the cast in fine spirits, but it certainly was hard on the scenery.” ;

Timeliness, romance, action and authenticity; these are the factors every successful picture must have. Theproducers took good care that “Submarine Patrol” should not lack for any of them.