1957 film by Dick Powell
The Enemy Below is a 1957 American DeLuxe Color war film in CinemaScope about a battle between an American destroyer escort and a German U-boat during World War II. It stars Robert Mitchum and Curt Jürgens as the American and German commanding officers, respectively. Produced and directed by Dick Powell, the film was based on the 1956 novel of the same name by Denys Rayner, a British naval officer involved in antisubmarine warfare throughout the Battle of the Atlantic.
Plot
It is some time in the middle of World War II. The American Buckley-class destroyer escort USS Haynes is on patrol in the South Atlantic. Lieutenant Commander Murrell, a former captain in the Merchant Marine and now an active-duty officer in the Naval Reserve, has recently taken command of the ship; he joined the Navy after his freighter was sunk by a German U-boat, and is still recovering from injuries incurred in the sinking of his previous Navy warship and 21 days marooned adrift afterwards.
Before the U-boat is first spotted, one sailor questions the new captain's fitness and ability. Once a skilled game of cat-and-mouse tracking the U-boat gives way to a series of even more finely honed and intuitive attacks, the crew falls in strongly behind their new skipper.
He's matching deadly wits with U-boat Kapitän zur See von Stolberg, a wily former World War I Unterseaboot skipper deep into a conflict he resents for a Nazi regime he detests. As the battle that emerges tests both commanders and their crews, each man grows to respect his opponent as he discovers his rival can read his mind.
Murrell stalks the U-boat and subjects von Stolberg and his crew to hourly depth-charge attacks, trying to force him to surface where his ship is more vulnerable. In the end, von Stolberg takes advantage of Murrell's predictable pattern of attacks and succeeds in torpedoing the Haynes. Murrell orders his men to set fires on the deck to make the damage look worse than it actually is, then to abandon ship; he retains only a skeleton crew to man the bridge, engine room, and one of his ship's three-inch (76 mm) guns. He orders his gun crew to fire at first opportunity at the U-boat's stern to immobilize it, and then at its deck gun. As Murrell had hoped, von Stolberg falls for the gambit and surfaces to fire another torpedo to finish the Haynes off. Before he can, Murrell rams the U-boat, with the bow of the Haynes riding up over its foredeck and becoming stuck. With his boat gored, von Stolberg orders his crew to set explosive scuttling charges and abandon ship, putting the Haynes in further peril.
Murrell, the last man aboard, is about to join his crew in the lifeboats when he spots von Stolberg standing on the conning tower of the U-boat. He refuses to abandon his injured executive officer Oberleutnant zur See Heini Schwaffer, who has been with him since "academy days". Murrell tosses a line to the submarine and rescues the pair. Schwaffer clearly is dying, but von Stolberg still will not leave his comrade behind. Lieutenant Ware returns in the captain's gig with a mixed party of American and German sailors, who race up the cargo nets to save the last survivors before the tangled vessels go up together in a conflagration.
Later, both crews are aboard a U.S. Navy vessel as German seamen ceremonially give Schwaffer a burial at sea, with the Haynes crew respectfully attending. Murrell and von Stolberg then share a moment at the stern, Murrell offering von Stolberg a cigarette as an olive branch. Von Stolberg, bitter about losing his ship, over losing his good friend, and about what has become of his country, says "I should have died a dozen times over, Captain. This time, it was your fault.". Morrell says "Fine, next time I won't throw you the rope." Von Stolberg chides back amicably, "Oh, I think you will."
Production
Writing
The screenplay, which was adapted by Wendell Mayes, differs substantially from the original book. In the novel, the ship is British, but in the film, it is American. The screenplay's final scenes of mutual respect between the protagonists are not taken from the book. In the book, the destroyer captain takes a swing at the U-boat captain while they are in the lifeboat because the U-boat captain claims that the destroyer crewmen are his prisoners. The film also alludes to evil in man (as personified by a concept such as the "devil") being the real "enemy" ("You cut off one head and it grows another..."), the force within that drives one man against another, or even against himself.
The screenplay has historical precedence. On 6 May 1944, USS Buckley, which was the lead ship of the same destroyer escort class portrayed in The Enemy Below, actually rammed and sank a U-boat in combat before capturing many of the German crew.[2]
Casting
The anti-Nazi U-boat captain was portrayed by actor Curd Jürgens, who had been an actual critic of Nazism in his native Germany. In 1944, after filming Wiener Mädeln, he got into an argument with Robert Kaltenbrunner (brother of high-ranking Austrian SS official Ernst Kaltenbrunner), SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, and a member of Baldur von Schirach's staff in a Viennese bar without knowing who they were. Jürgens was arrested and sent to a labor camp for the "politically unreliable" in Hungary. After a few weeks, he managed to escape and went into hiding.[3][4][5] Jürgens became an Austrian citizen after the war.
The destroyer escort USS Haynes (DE-181) was represented in the film by the USS Whitehurst (DE-634), provided by the US Navy in Pearl Harbor. Many of the actual ship's crew appear in the film, such as the phone talkers, the gun and depth charge crews, and all of the men seen abandoning ship. The Whitehurst'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 while an enlisted man is reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.[citation needed] The Whitehurst was sunk as a target in 1971. The real DE-181 was USS Straub (DE-181), a Cannon-class destroyer escort (scrapped 1974).
Filming
Despite being set in the South Atlantic, filming of the open ocean scenes took place in the Pacific Ocean near Oahu, Hawaii. A ship collision set and filming of the abandon ship scenes took place off of Los Angeles.
Music
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," known by the first line of lyrics as "So leben wir" ("That's how we live"). The burial hymn in the final scene is "Ich hatt' einen Kameraden",
Awards and nominations
For the audio effects, Walter Rossi received the 1958 Academy Award for Best Special Effects.[6] The film was also awarded as the best sound-edited feature of 1957 by the Motion Picture Sound Editors.[7]
Reception
Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic described The Enemy Below as a 'compact, competently written, ably acted little drama'.[when?][8][failed verification]
