Pluskylang Great Film overall

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Leofwine_draca SUBMARINE SEAHAWK is a bog-standard WW2 story about the crew of an American submarine patrolling the waters in the western Pacific and getting involved in various scrapes and battles with their Japanese enemies. While the picture does attempt a little characterisation on those at the top, this is very much a sub-par movie compared to the true classics of the genre starring the likes of Richard Widmark who were able to fully realise the complexity of a man whose job it is is to care for his men while acting completely mercilessly towards the enemy. It doesn't help that the storyline has been done to death and much better in other instances.This picture was put out by Nicholson and Arkoff at AIP, a studio more at home making B-movie sci-fi or horror pictures. The only thing it really has going for it are some excellent, expensive-looking battle sequences, some of which seem to be actual footage from the war. I'm sure stock footage was used extensively and it really helps, because the script is dullish and the cast even more so. John Bentley, a British actor so good in various crime thrillers of the 1950s, is hard to swallow as the American captain and feels outside of his comfort zone. You just want him to come home and make more British films.

brislack I was very surprised to see John Bentley in this movie. I remember him in the distant past as a particularly wooden actor in British 'B' films. Maybe that is why casting chose him for his part as a non-communicative, wooden, officer!All the same, to me as a Brit, he actually sounded like an American and 'rose to the part!'. Maybe the best actor in the thing.My title above is a saying that refers to the old Royal Navy warships of the past, which were often called wooden walls. Thought you all might like to know that!As for the movie itself, well it has already been covered in the above posts. Not a good war film. Was this mission something that really happened in the Pacific War?

johneastlund dumb dialogue, lousy acting, silly story, overly dramatic background music. It ends up being a satire or caricature of all the good submarine movies even though they were being serious when they made it. It uses every cliché of a submarine movie, crew members going nuts, sneaking thru minefields, torpedoes that miss, the captain following orders in conflict with the crew, getting depth charged, having to make repairs while the enemy is around. It's not a crew I would want to go to sea with, untrained, undisciplined. The main plot is implausible. I could see a movie of this quality coming out 20 years earlier when they cranked out propaganda movies for the war. The character development needs a little work. I'm not surprised the actors are unfamiliar to anybody.

NavyOrion You've seen this movie before, done by everybody from Cary Grant ("Destination Tokyo") to Clark Gable ("Run Silent Run Deep") to Glenn Ford ("Torpedo Run"), and done better in pretty much every case.This is a cast of nobody-you-ever-heard-of (for good reasons; I hope they didn't quit their day jobs) in a stock WWII plot about a sub on a secret mission. The acting is atrocious, the characters are incredibly clichéd (especially annoying: the short enlisted "comic relief" Jerry Lewis clone), and there are plot holes big enough to drive a submarine through.If that were all it had, I'd give "Submarine Seahawk" maybe 2 stars, as an almost complete waste of film. However, this movie is saved from the scrap pile by better than average effects (some borrowed from other films), particularly in the climactic scene of the air assault on the Japanese flotilla. It's the explosions, fires, and splashes that usually give the model work in naval movies that shot-in-the-bathtub look. But especially considering how long ago this movie was made (and its obviously meager budget) those visuals were very nicely done. If for no other reason (and I sure can't think of any) this movie is worth watching for the impressive effects in that scene.What's the best way to see "Submarine Seahawk"? Do as I did the first time I saw it, and miss the first hour or so. (I only wish I had missed that part again on my second viewing.) 9 stars for the attack scene, 2 for the rest of the movie.