The Enemy Below is a 1957 war film which tells the story of the battle between the captain of an American destroyer escort and the commander of a German U-boat during World War II. It stars Robert Mitchum, Curd Jürgens, David Hedison and Theodore Bikel. The movie was directed and produced by Dick Powell. The film was based on a novel by Denys Rayner, a British naval officer involved in anti-submarine warfare throughout the Second Battle of the Atlantic.
Walter Rossi received the 1958 Academy Award for best special effects.
Plot
The movie revolves around a battle between an American Buckley-class destroyer escort, the USS Haynes (DE-181), and a German U-boat that is attempting to rendezvous with a German merchant raider in the South Atlantic Ocean. Captain Murrell (Mitchum), a former officer in the merchant marine and now an active duty Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Reserve, has recently taken command of the Haynes, even though he is still weak from having survived the sinking of his previous ship. When the U-boat is first detected, some members of the crew of the Haynes doubt their unfamiliar captain's fitness and ability. However, Murrell shows himself to be a match for wily U-boat Kapitän von Stolberg (Jürgens) in a prolonged, deadly battle of wits that tests both men and their crews. Each man grows to respect his opponent.
In the end, von Stolberg succeeds in torpedoing the destroyer. However, Murrell has one last trick up his sleeve. He has his men set fires on the deck to make the ship look more damaged than it actually is, hoping that von Stolberg will decide to surface and sink the destroyer with the U-boat's deck gun instead of using another valuable torpedo. The trick works, and when von Stolberg surfaces to finish off the Haynes, Murrell uses his ship's guns to disable the submarine and destroy its deck gun, and then rams the U-boat with his sinking ship ensuring that both vessels will be destroyed.
The two commanders see each other and exchange salutes. When Murrell realizes that von Stolberg will not leave his dying friend, "Heini" Schwaffer (Theodore Bikel), he helps get them both off the U-boat. The survivors are rescued by another American destroyer. The Americans look on respectfully as von Stolberg and the surviving U-boat crew consign Schwaffer's body to the deep.
Differences from the novel
In the movie, pipe-smoking, chess-playing British captain Murrell becomes Mitchum's U.S. Navy man. The fact that the aristocratic German captain and his senior officers are contemptuous of Hitler and the Nazis is one of the themes of the film—after a zealous young Nazi officer recently assigned to the crew has greeted von Stolberg with "Heil Hitler," Schwaffer comments that the young man is new to the ship and will soon get tired of the politically correct Nazi formalities. The fact that von Stolberg and the other officers are very obviously not supporters of the Nazis, but merely military men serving their country, makes this one of the first examples of a "good German, bad German" scenario in a major American film, though for Rayner, the Prussian U-boat commander still embodies the attitudes and brutal behavior against which Murrell and his crew are fighting.
However, a conversation between two members of the American crew during a lull in the action about whether the ship's stewards are "happy" makes at least an indirect reference that the US Navy was racially segregated during World War II, with African-Americans restricted to service as mess attendants and stewards. In the film, at least one African-American serves among the K-gun crew of the ship, taking a more active combat-oriented role.
In the novel, Murrell tells his ship's doctor that "unrestricted submarine warfare has never been part of British Naval practice, except of course against enemy warships." The film is more oblique. Murrell mentions that his wife was aboard his merchant ship and died when it was sunk by a torpedo; von Stolberg mentions that both of his sons have died in the war and comments that, unlike World War I, this is not a "good" war. In the film, von Stolberg calms and reassures a panicking sailor running amok with a wrench; in the novel, he shoots him.
The reconciliation between the commanders in the movie's finale, beginning with a mutual salute aboard the flaming wrecks of their vessels, differs from Rayner's version where, after a courteous overture by Murrell is rebuffed by von Stolberg, both commanders and the rest of the swimming survivors remain "locked in deadly combat", swapping punches in the sea - an ending more reminiscent of John Boorman's 1969 World War II film Hell in the Pacific, starring Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune.
In the movie, Murrell is about to abandon ship when he runs back to throw a rope to von Stolberg, who has remained with the dying Schwaffer on the U-boat conning tower and is apparently waiting to die when the U-boat's scuttling charges will detonate. Murrell and von Stolberg are able to move Schwaffer to the destroyer, which is also certain to sink when the sub explodes, but von Stolberg explains to Murrell in English that he will not leave Schwaffer because "he is my friend."
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Ware, seeing the three men stranded on the burning destroyer, orders the mixed American and German crew of the lifeboat he's commanding to go back to the destroyer even though this means putting the survivors in danger. Americans and Germans alike then race against time to rescue Murrell, von Stolberg and Schwaffer.
Cast
- Robert Mitchum as Captain Murrell
- Curd Jürgens as Kapitän von Stolberg. Jürgens was imprisoned by order of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels during World War II.
- Theodore Bikel as 'Heinie' Schwaffer, von Stolberg's second in command. Bikel is an immigrant Austrian Jew who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1924. He and his family fled to America by way of Palestine in 1937.
- Al Hedison as Lieutenant Ware, the executive officer of the Haynes
- Russell Collins as Doctor, USS Haynes
- Kurt Kreuger as Von Holem
- Frank Albertson as Lieutenant Junior Grade Crain, USS Haynes
- Biff Elliot as Quartermaster, USS Haynes
Production
The destroyer escort USS Haynes was portrayed by USS Whitehurst (DE-634), filmed in the Pacific Ocean near Oahu, Hawaii. Many of the Whitehurst's crewmen acted in the film: The phone talkers, the gun and depth charge crews, the sailor fishing, and all of the men seen abandoning ship, were Whitehurst sailors. The ship's commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Walter Smith, played the engineering officer. He is the man seen reading comics (Little Orphan Annie) during the lull before the action.
Comparison with U-Boat classes and the real DE-181
The original DE-181 was the USS Straub, a Buckley Class escort destroyer; also described in the movie. She did have 3x3 torpedo tubes where the movie indicated that she did not. She did serve off the coast of Trinidad, Spain; but after the battle with a German U-boat. The Straub did recover the crew of a German U-boat like in the movie, but the sub was sunk by aircraft during combat in 1944, off the coast of Recife, Brazil, like in movie.[1]
The U-Boat depicted in the film is also very unrealistic in its size. The U-Boat in the film has passageways and side rooms, with the Captain having a private stateroom off the control center. Even the final U-Boat class of the Second World War, the German Type XXI submarine, was cramped and allowed for only very close quarters. No German U-Boot of World War II had staterooms and the Captain's bunk was little more than a shelf across a small passage from the radio room which was itself merely a small closet.
Fresh water was also extremely limited aboard U-boats, and the crew is also much neater and cleaner that a real U-boot crew would have been (for a more realistic portrayal of life aboard a U-boat see Das Boot).
"Remakes"
- The Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode "Killers of the Deep" was not only based on this movie, it also re-used substantial amounts of footage from it.
Trivia
- The tune sung by the U-boat crew on the ocean floor between depth charge attacks is from an 18th century march called "Der Dessauer Marsch". As a more popular song, it's also known by the first line of lyrics: "So leben wir" ("That's how we live").
References in popular culture
At the beginning of the movie Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995), the crew of the USS Alabama goes on board and talks about submarine movies, quoting The Enemy Below.
References
- Rayner, D.A., The Enemy Below, London: Collins 1956
External links
