Lightly entertaining John Wayne submarine drama.The Pacific Theatre of WW2. Lt Commander Duke Gifford (played by John Wayne) is the Executive Officer of a US Navy submarine, the USS Thunderfish. The submarine fleet, incl the Thunderfish, is suffering from malfunctioning torpedoes. Meanwhile Commander Gifford is also trying to win back his ex-wife...A stereotypical John Wayne movie, i.e. overly gung ho and not that accurate, militarily. Some quite unrealistic battle scenes. The relationship side is mildly interesting but also overly melodramatic and complex. Not all bad though, as long as you don't think too much. The battle scenes are quite exciting and there are some insights into submarine life.

. . . actor John Wayne as "Duke" commands his ex-wife while appropriating a random, unrelated orphan newborn from the local hospital to close OPERATION PACIFIC. So while this ready-made Daddy is busy bringing down enemy destroyers, planes, subs, tankers, and aircraft carriers, Junior can look forward to about six days annually with dear old Pops. Speaking of "Pop," goes the weasel, if you can suffer a spoiler about OP's Captain Ahab moment. And talk about product DIS-placement. Near the middle of this flick, producer Warner Bros. asserts that their 1942 Jack Benny film titled GEORGE WASHINGTON SLEPT HERE is so boring that it will doom any submarine below the surface of the seas on the weekly movie night. It's a wonder that OP's lead actress Patricia Neal didn't wind up with Prince Albert in a can by the end of 1951. First she got Michael Rennie from a saucer during THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, and then "the Duke" from a sardine tin here. Klaatu Barada Nikto, anyone?

I like submarine films, but in watching them one has to realize that there are only so many plot situations and each film seems to cover just about all of them. In fact the officers and men of the U.S.S. Thunderfish during what little spare time they had were watching another Warner Brother submarine adventure, Destination Tokyo. If you remember they exchanged the film with another submarine crew for George Washington Slept Here.Operation Pacific unfortunately suffered with an additional handicap, not foreseen by the Brothers Warner. Another film from Paramount entitled Submarine Command came out right about the same time as Operation Pacific. It starred John Wayne's very good friend and box office rival William Holden. A lot of the same situations are covered in that film, hard to distinguish between the two.That being said Operation Pacific is one of John Wayne's better war films and a good tribute to the men of the Silent Service. I remember back in the day, I had a history professor in college who was a marine in World War II. He said without reservation that for all of what he was doing in places like Tarawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, the tipping balance in the Pacific War was the American superiority in submarines. Due in no small part to the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet Chester W. Nimitz who trained on submarines and appreciated their worth. Cutting supplies to the home islands helped in no small measure to American combat success ultimately.John Wayne is the Executive Officer of the Thunderfish which is commanded by Ward Bond. His former wife Patricia Neal is a navy nurse at Pearl Harbor. He'd like to win her back, but she's now dating Philip Carey, a navy flier and Bond's younger brother.Besides the romantic problems the Thunderfish goes on all kinds of missions. We first see them rescuing some orphan children off a Japanese held island, later they have some real problems with defective torpedoes in which Chief Jack Pennick has a big hand in solving. And of course the usual tangles with the Japanese Navy exploding depth charges around them.In the supporting cast I have to say that my two favorite performances are from Paul Picerni who plays crewman Jonesy. Picerni's best known for being Robert Stack's number 2 guy in The Untouchables, but he's absolutely great as the comic relief in Operation Pacific. Happy-go-lucky sort of guy, if he were Latino, Gilbert Roland would have had the part.The second is Jack Pennick. You can't think of too many John Ford films his horseface presence wasn't in. He plays the Chief Petty Officer on the Thunderfish and he's simply known as the Chief. Ford usually gave him minimal dialog in his films, he speaks a bit more here. One of my favorite John Wayne moments in cinema is when Wayne speaks a heartfelt tribute to young ensign Martin Milner after Pennick has been killed. Talking about the accomplishments that people of his rank make to the U.S. Navy. If your eyes don't moisten you are made of stone. It is in fact one of my favorite John Wayne scenes of all time.Though the Duke and Patricia Neal got a lot more attention fourteen years later in In Harm's Way, I think they do just fine in Operation Pacific and I think you'll feel the same way when you see it.

It's hard to decide which genre provided John Wayne the greater opportunity to showcase his talents - the "Western" or the "War Movie". Clearly, he excelled at both (and had more than a few opportunities to demonstrate it). Personally, I've always been a greater fan of his westerns, but when this film appeared on one of my favorite cable channels this afternoon, I found myself willingly drawn in. Although a lot of its elements are standard WWII fare, Operation Pacific still demonstrates why the genre has proven so successful to Hollywood.This one includes all the cliches - the tragedy of lives lost for a just cause (in this case, the war in the Pacific), the heroism of the men who gave up their lives for that cause (here it's a submarine crew based out of "Pearl"), and the women forced to wait patiently while the men they loved went into harm's way.Although a lot of this seems outdated and stereotyped some 50 years later, the movies that were made during and immediately following WWII nevertheless reflect the ideals and values that drove an entire nation (and generation) to act and feel as it did. My own father, who was a Navy man during the war, was a big fan of John Wayne. I have to believe that Wayne personified some of the very same values my father had come to embrace as a youth and during his time in the military. For me, this adds some validity and perspective.I know this is not considered to be Wayne's best war film (and admit to not being an enthusiastic student of the genre), but I'm confident that it's a good example of why these films were (and remain) so popular.