Terrible. Awful. GAWDoffal dialogue. Wooden. Stilted. Insulting, even for 1954 audiences. Sam Fuller must have lived in a submarine for decades without knowing what wimmin are like. Or good movies. Hard to believe he ever got another job after this abortion. This is a John Wayne/John Ford war movie as if produced and directed by Ed Wood, in a horizontal proscenium arch, the camera rarely moving to give us another angle. What a waste of celluloid. The cartoonish plot is OK, with a little suspense, the least of the negatives about this wreck. Richard Widmark is a one-trick pony, trying to act like he's about 6 inches taller and 50 lbs heavier. Hard to believe Daryl Zanuck cast his mistress in this turkey. And they actually set up an expensive promotional campaign, shown as an extra feature in the DVD. There are no sparks of any merit---even the love scene was directed to be acted as if by little boys without a clue to know what grownups actually do. Even the hackneyed title is poorly chosen, a faux exaggeration of what follows. An atom bomb goes off and it looks like what would pass today for a small, contained explosion with a few flames. The stuff of a made- for-TV movie the network would not have broadcast once they saw the result. Had i the misfortune of seeing this in a theater i would have booed. I could go on but you get the point. Save yourself 1 hr and 43 mins of your life, which is too precious to include this.

This is little more than a programmer designed for the undemanding and very much a product of its time. Take the casting, for example, Fox knew they had a good thing in Widmark and seemed bent on keeping him working - this was his nineteenth movie in eight years - as long as he was solid marquee product. He was a much finer actor than that but this was the tail-end of the Studio System. As for the female lead, Darryl Zanuck was a noted swordsman with a penchant for putting his girlfriends in his productions (next up would be Juliette Greco) and who knows, in Polish born Bella Darvi he may have been thinking of a brunette version of Kim Novak though why anyone would want a brunette non-actress as well as a blonde non-actress is one for the Professors. The next factor is the period, this was the era of The Woman On Pier 13, I Was A Communist For The FBI and so on, the Reds under the bed syndrome. Here we have a gang of Reds bent on dropping an atomic bomb on Korea from a B29 thus leaving America with egg on its face. Not to worry, Widmark and his merry men SHOOT it out of the sky from a sub. Say no more.

When yet another atomic scientist goes missing behind the Iron Curtain, a private submarine expedition is put together to trail a freighter suspected of being able to lead the crew to what is believed to be the place where the Chinese are conducting nuclear research in preparation for a war. Former submarine commander Jones is contracted to lead the exhibition with a ragtag crew and a submarine in need of maintenance time that is not available to him. With Professor Montel technically in charge with his (female) assistant Professor Gerard by his side, the boat sets out on the mission of observation but with the ever present threat of danger in the hostile waters.A bit of a romp this one as it revels more in the gaudy sweep of the telling rather than the tension from narrative detail. The plot doesn't really matter so much as it is a simple device for the voyage. Along the way we get personal conflicts, crew tensions and underwater stand-offs as well as some fire-fights. At no point was I hooked but it is rather entertaining in the way that school-boy adventure stories are – full of tough men, sacrifice and action. In this regard it suits the people making it and Fuller directs with simple but bright colours – easy to understand and engage with even if they are too simple to be real. So it is with the characters and plot but it still works. The romantic side of the story is a flop and I didn't see why a female character couldn't just be a character and had to be a love interest (well, obviously I understand why this decision is made, but I didn't see the value of it in the story).The headlining of Richard Widmark is rarely a bad thing and he fits this tough action drama with his stern delivery and commanding presence. There is no doubting that Darvi is sexy and a good presence when it comes to being coy and flirtatious however when more is asked of her she is found wanting as she lacks the range. The rest of the cast fit in well around them – nobody brilliant of course but everyone able to be at the level required by the material.Not that intelligent or complex a film but a solid enough wartime action film which will do the job if that's all you're looking for.

Nobody ever claimed Samuel Fuller was an artist, especially not Fuller himself. He was to movies the same thing he was to newspapers, a cigar-chomping primitive. This, along with Fixed Bayonets and Pickup on South Street, is among his best movies. It's his usual stuff -- big closeups, rudimentary dialogue and character -- souped up by a larger budget than usual. A lot of it went for special effects. The Big Boom of the atomic bomb, still something of a fearful novelty in those days. And, for the first time in my memory, a war movie delineates the trajectory of tracer bullets. (Only it's hard to see on the small screen.)The story is simple enough. A bunch of mercenaries of varied backgrounds is hired to man a submarine and gather intelligence and they undergo the usual dangers, except that there are no depth charges. There is a crude and horny seaman who is the source of some laughs. There is one of those non-English speakers (a Chinese guy) who sings a traditional American song by Cole Porter and mixes it up with a lot of slang. There is the egghead that is usually found in a Howard Hawks movie. There is the love interest, a discovery of the producer and his wife, who is named Bella Darvi (DAR Daryll, and VI = Virginia). She wound up addicted to gambling and her career was practically nonexistent. Our sub rams and sinks a Chinese sub. (Isn't that against some kind of law?) Everybody gets on deck and shoots at a passing airplane, to good effect. The professor loses a thumb in a horrific scene. In another awful scene, the slangy Chinese guy gets his brains beaten out. I don't know, but I kind of enjoy it. Nice technicolor, good battle scenes, and Richard Widmark is always dependable if not necessarily memorable. Sam Fuller had absolutely no aspirations and he lives up to them here.