The Enemy Below

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The Enemy Below
Movie Poster
Directed by	Dick Powell
Produced by	Dick Powell
Written by	Wendell Mayes Denys Rayner (novel)
Starring	Robert Mitchum Curt Jurgens Theodore Bikel David Hedison
Music by	Leigh Harline
Cinematography	Harold Rosson
Editing by	Stuart Gilmore
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	December 25, 1957 (NYC premiere)
Running time	98 min.
Country	USA
Language	English
IMDb profile

The Enemy Below is a 1957 film which tells the story of battle between the captain of an American destroyer escort and the commander of a German submarine during World War II. It stars Robert Mitchum, Curd Jürgens, David Hedison and Theodore Bikel. The movie was directed and produced by Dick Powell.

The film received the 1958 Academy Award for best special effects.

1 Synopsis
2 Differences With Novel
3 Trivia
4 External links
- 4.1 DVD Reviews
5 Reference

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The movie revolves around a Buckley-class destroyer escort, USS Haynes (DE-181), and a German U-boat attempting to rendezvous with a German merchant raider in the South Atlantic Ocean. The Haynes is commanded by Captain Murrell (Mitchum), a former merchant marine sailor. Murrell engages in a deadly battle of wits with U-boat Kapitän von Stolberg (Jürgens). In the end, Murrell rams the U-boat with his ship, sinking both.

[edit] Differences With Novel

The film was based on a novel by Denys Rayner DSC & Bar, VRD, RNVR (1908–67) — a British naval officer involved in submarine warfare throughout the second Battle of the Atlantic. In the movie, pipe-smoking, chess-playing British captain Murrell becomes Mitchum's U.S. navy man. The tension between the aristocratic German captain, contemptuous of Hitler, and a zealous Nazi subordinate is depicted in the film and may have been the first instance of the "good German, bad German" scenario, though for Rayner, the Prussian U-boat commander still embodies the attitudes and brutal behavior against which Murrell and his crew are fighting. In the novel, Murrell tells his ship's doctor that "unrestricted submarine warfare has never been part of British Naval practice, except of course against enemy warships." The film is more oblique. Murrell lets out that his wife died after his merchant ship was sunk by a torpedo. In the film, von Stolberg calms and reassures a panicking sailor running amok with a wrench; in the novel, he shoots him. The reconciliation between the commanders in the movie's finale, beginning with a mutual salute amid the flaming wreckage of both their craft, differs from Rayner's version where, after a courteous overture by Murrell is rebuffed by von Stolberg, both commanders and the rest of the swimming survivors remain "locked in deadly combat", swapping punches in the sea - an ending more reminiscent of John Boorman's WW2 film Hell in the Pacific (1969) starring Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune.

[edit] Trivia

The destroyer escort Straub was portrayed by USS Whitehurst (DE-634), filmed in the Pacific Ocean near Oahu, Hawaii. Many of the Whitehurst's crewmen participated. The men wearing the telephone headsets, the gun and depth charge crews, the sailor fishing, and all of the men seen abandoning ship, were Whitehurst sailors. The ship's commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Walter Smith, played the role of the engineering officer. He is the man seen reading the comics during the lull before the action. The Whitehurst website, linked below, has more on this story including several still photos taken during the filming.
Curt Jurgens, who plays the German captain, was imprisoned by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels during World War II.
The Star Trek episode "Balance of Terror" was based on The Enemy Below.
The Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode "Killers of the Deep" was not only based on this movie, but it also re-used substantial ammounts of footage from it.
Theodore Bikel, who plays Curt Jurgens First Officer, is an immigrant Austrian Jew who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1924, and fled with his family to America by way of Palestine in 1937.