Ealing
Studios, the oldest film production studio still functioning in the world,
produced some of Great Britain’s finest and most revered cinematic
landmarks. Moreover a majority of them
came together just years after the end of the very event which shaped their
creation in the first place: the Second World War. Among the most critically acclaimed and
commercially successful British films to emerge from this then-recent postwar
period of cinematic reckoning with the aftermath of the war was the big screen
adaptation of Lt. Commander Nicholas Monsarrat’s still galvanizing yet
compelling novel The Cruel Sea.
A
sort of wartime memoir following the lives of several members of the Royal Navy
during the Battle of the Atlantic it presents a tense ensemble drama of what it
meant to fight and survive the war at sea, derived largely from Monsarrat’s
personal experiences serving in the North Atlantic. Told through the perspective of Lt. Commander
George Ericson (Jack Hawkins), The Cruel
Sea inhabits the lives of these soldiers at sea tasked with shielding
convoys while sniffing out and destroying enemy submarines.
Helmed
by war film veteran Charles Frend and shot largely on the Ealing Studios
soundstage, The Cruel Sea united a
cast of fine British actors including a young Denholm Elliott (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Sir Donald
Sinden and Stanley Baker. Signaling the
director’s grand return to the postwar cinematic battlefield by striking
cinematic gold at the box office, The
Cruel Sea is best remembered for cementing actor Jack Hawkins’ status as
one of the British Film Industry’s most illustrious talents.
A
veteran himself having served in the Second World War, Hawkins appeared in many
numerous war pictures and already formed an onscreen reputation as a stern yet
sympathetic soldier with Angels One Five. With The
Cruel Sea in the leading role of the conflicted yet determined Lt.
Commander Ericson, the film catapulted the actor to superstardom in the British
film world. Scenes of the Commander
forced with the painful decision to charge on ahead past soldiers left to die
in the ocean will especially burrow themselves into the viewer’s subconscious well
after the film has ended.
Though
certain scenes reveal limitations of the soundstages including the obvious use
of a large water tank, The Cruel Sea nevertheless
succeeds in conveying an experience of war fought on the barren yet harsh and
unpredictable aquatic landscape of the Atlantic Ocean. While mostly focused on the tough decisions
being made by the Lt. Commander, the novel and film adapted for the screen by
Eric Ambler jumps freely between side stories involving the sailors working on
the HMS Compass Rose, building a sense a camaraderie as well as greater tragedy
as the unforgiving war comes to pass.
One
particularly searing moment adapted faithfully from the novel involves the
parting thoughts of drowning soldiers conveyed through voice-over by the
cast. For a war drama of the period, the
inter-cutting between various dying characters produces a jet black sequence
conveying the chilly yet ferocious indifference of elemental oceanic power
expressed figuratively and literally.
That said, the film also leaves room for moments of levity including an
amusing aside involving dinner thrown about the kitchen from turbulent white
caps.
Opening
to glowing reviews in 1953, The Cruel Sea
became the most commercially successful British film of the year and
solidified actor Hawkins’ place in cinema history among the all-time great
performances. Seen now the film inhabits
a rare sub-genre of war as experience in film rather than as conventional
three-act narrative cinema. Ranked 75th
in the BFI’s Top 100 British Films list, The
Cruel Sea still manages to knock one’s wind out with its unflinching look
at life in war fought on the turbulent Atlantic Ocean in one of the world and
human history’s most difficult and trying of times.
--Andrew Kotwicki
