The great thing about The Cruel Sea is that it doesn’t pull any punches. Films made pretty soon after the close of the second world war often gave a very airbrushed account of the war but in The Cruel Sea, we see the people left behind die or desert or cheat or grow apart. We also see the heroes as real people they die, have breakdowns, fake illness, squabble and have doubts and concerns about the rights and wrongs of the war. Tremendously realistic stuff this. I haven’t checked, but I’d guess that this was based on a someone’s non-fiction account of their wartime experiences. It features first-person narration from the main character and follows a pretty episodic structure. That said, this style of narrative works well and allows the film to draw the viewer in to a series of extremely tense moments. The intelligent use of silence and periods of intense concentration really crank up the tension which director Charles Frend stretches out for long periods of time. Very controlled film-making that.
And so what we have here is the war through the eyes of a Navy captain who guides ships which escort cargo convoys through the u-boat ridden waters of the Atlantic. It was made by Ealing and features a great cast who all do a great job. Hawkins in the lead role is the star but Donald Sinden comes awfully close to stealing some of his scenes, he just doesn’t have the kind of material Hawkins is given. The contrast between the grim stoicism with which Hawkins issues the instruction to drop munitions amongst the survivors of a wrecked freighter in the hope of destroying the u-boat he believes is beneath them and the hollow, broken remorse he shows in the scenes from that evening are the key to the whole thing. Horrible things were done and had to be done. Regrettable things, things that will live on your conscience until your dying breath. But they were done for the greater good and the sacrifice and loss and pain and regret that everyone endured was necessary to prevent Nazi success (though the film takes the last bit as read rather and barely considers it).
There are sequences in this film which are almost unbearably tense. As the ship lies still in the presumed presence of a u-boat under repair, the men are shown inside listening for the slightest sound, dipping with sweat, crossing themselves, lookin anxiously at one another. All of the time there is almost total silence on screen. The release of the tension when they move on again is enormous and the extent of that shows the strength of the film as a means of bringing the reality of the war at sea home.
And that is what there is to take away from The Cruel Sea, its very real depiction of the awful conditions that the war really entailed. Harrowing and memorable.
