Prewar Hazards Of Getting In Ship-Shape

Warners Putting Submarine D-1 To 1937 Sea

Service pics between wars had to generate crisis not from combat, but training and implement of new modes for defense. Death-dealing climb/plunge toward higher flight and greater depths made experimental planes/subs more lethal than enemy fire. By Hollywood reckoning, there were more casualties off battlefields than on, but how else to generate excitement when wars weren't raging? Submarine D-1 dealt with rescue from sunk subs using then-sophisticated, now impossibly crude and impracticable, means. So we built a war-winning navy from this? It's very antiquity of such devices that fascinate today. Otherwise, Submarine D-1 is the Cagney-O'Brien formula with newcomer Wayne Morris replacing Jim, a punk substitution that didn't seem so in '37 thanks to build-up Morris was getting after Kid Galahad. He was a likeable enough lug, sort of a Sonny Tufts arrived early, but wouldn't make stardom's highest grade. Keynote of any uniformed branch was teamwork, and H'wood held up that end by not permitting iconoclasts to get upper hand over duty and tradition. Act One's wiseacre would always come an Act Two's cropper, then Act Three spit-polish convert (or in case of too dynamic Cagney, dead on an alter of sacrifice for the team). There is fleet footage a result of Naval cooperation, plus location at New London, CT that presages Technicolor shot there for 1943's Crash Dive. Warners was of a mind with other majors impatient to load weaponry for real, no small number of these training exercises making it appear as though we've already declared war on then-recognized, though not yet engaged, enemies.