The Cruel Sea (1953) - film review

At the beginning of WWII, Captain Ericson takes charge of a recently commissioned Royal Navy corvette, the Compass Rose, and immediately begins a series of trials with his inexperienced crew of raw recruits.   It isn’t long before the Compass Rose and her crew are given their first mission, to escort a convoy of ships across the North Atlantic.  It is hard to say which poses the greater threat - the tempestuous ocean or the German U-boats that furtively patrol the shipping lanes looking for easy targets.  At least the Compass Rose is equipped to deal with the latter.  The experience of war soon begins to take its toll on Ericson and his men.  What began as an adventure becomes a long hard struggle to survive, a nightmare that will never end...

One of Ealing Studios’ more ambitious war films is this startlingly realist adaptation of Nicholas Monsarrat’s popular novel The Cruel Sea.  Its director, Charles Frend, had previously made another notable wartime drama for Ealing, The Big Blockade (1940), as well as Scott of the Antarctic (1948) and The Magnet (1950).  Prior to this, Frend had worked as an editor, his best work being on Hitchcock’s early classics Sabotage (1936) and Young and Innocent (1937).  It was through his collaborations with Alberto Cavalcanti that Frend developed a penchant for documentary-style realism, which is most apparent in The Cruel Sea, arguably his best film.

In contrast to many war films of this period, The Cruel Sea vigorously eschews the familiar clichés, melodramatic contrivances and toe-curling jingoism for a more unbiased naturalistic approach.  The film’s episodic structure and restrained narrative style give it a realism that makes what we witness particularly poignant and occasionally brutally shocking.  Thanks to the compelling and heart-wrenching performances from a high calibre cast, we see not only the physical impact of war – the destruction and terrible loss of life – but the psychological damage that also arises.  The main character, Ericson (superbly portrayed by Jack Hawkins in his first great role), is visibly tormented by the decisions he has to make and, in a moment of horrific realisation, knows that he may lose his humanity if he is to continue doing his job effectively.  

One pivotal sequence is the one where Ericson’s crew succeed in scuppering a Nazi U-boat and come face-to-face with their human adversaries for the first time, four years into the war.  The captain seems genuinely surprised when he sees that the German U-boat crew are recognisable human beings, weak flesh and blood like he is, not rampaging multi-tentacled monsters from an H.G. Wells story.  The dehumanising influence of war has done its work.  The enemy are not men, but some abstract depersonalised threat, as nebulous as the other enemy faced by Ericson and his crew, the cruel sea.  The main strength of this film is that it confronts us with what is possibly the most diabolical aspect of warfare.  The supreme tragedy of war is not that it destroys lives and leaves devastation and anguish in its wake, but that it compels us to surrender the one thing we should treasure most, our humanity.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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