It’s a top-rank war movie, the best of its kind. The Ealing Studios, writer Eric Ambler and director Charles Frend transpose Nicholas Monserrat’s best seller to the screen with honesty and realism. Little-known now, the show was a hit in America, too. It made a star of Jack Hawkins and raised the profiles of Donald Sinden, Denholm Elliott, Stanley Baker, and Virginia McKenna. It’s superior filmmaking all around — we forget details and invest ourselves in the fates of these brave people facing uncertain lives … hmmm, that hits home.

The Cruel Sea
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1953 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 126 min. / Street Date April 22, 2025 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring:
Jack Hawkins, Donald Sinden, John Stratton, Denholm Elliott, John Warner, Stanley Baker, Bruce Seton, Liam Redmond, Virginia McKenna, Moira Lister, June Thorburn, Megs Jenkins, Meredith Edwards, Glyn Houston, Alec McCowen, Sam Kydd, Don Sharp, Joan Ingram.
Cinematography: Gordon Dines
Art Director: Jim Morahan
Film Editor: Peter Tanner
Special Visual Effects: Sydney Pearson, Geoffrey Dickinson
Original Music: Alan Rawsthorne
Screenplay by Eric Ambler from the novel by Nicholas Monsarrat
Executive Producer Michael Balcon
Produced by Leslie Norman
Directed by Charles Frend

The Cruel Sea is both the best and the most realistic film about war at sea. An earlier disc release created a cover image by placing the film’s stars over a bright flag, but the movie is not a rousing call to patriotic glory. Nor is it about extraordinary seagoing exploits, like the later  The Battle of the River Plate or  Sink the Bismarck!  It is instead a work of great integrity by The Ealing Studio, the quietly overachieving makers of droll comedies and dramas with unexpected twists. Ealing’s idea of a great war movie was 1942’s  Went the Day Well?,  a wickedly defiant, violent tale of home front resistance, from a story by Graham Greene.

The Cruel Sea is from a popular novel by Nicholas Monsarrat, with a screenplay by another fine author, Eric Ambler. Its heroes are mostly non-career sailors and officers. The episodic story drops heroics entirely to concentrate on the honest realities faced by young seamen and officers serving in the most dangerous theater of war, the North Atlantic. Director Charles Frend had done well with his 1948 Technicolor true adventure  Scott of the Antarctic, but this oceangoing picture was an even bigger challenge. No patriotic music plays as our ship goes into battle, and none of the battles are the triumphant kind. As emphasized by the author, the sailors’ biggest enemy is the sea itself.

We were lucky to catch this show on an old 2005 Anchor Bay DVD, even though its audio was rough and the running time several minutes short. This excellent HD remaster may be the same encoding as seen on a Region B UK disc from 2011.

Early in 1940, almost two years before America’s entrance into the war, Captain Ericson (Jack Hawkins) takes command of the escort Corvette the Compass Rose. He’s a reserve officer but almost all of his experience has been on merchant vessels. Ericson must form a crew with officers that have only been given a few weeks’ training. Some have never been to sea. His first officer Bennett (Stanley Baker) is an offensive martinet, so tightly wound that he suffers from ulcers. The green sub-lieutenants begin knowing almost nothing. Ferraby (John Stratton) is polite and impressionable. Lockhart (Donald Sinden) has a bit of sailing experience; he’s quiet and capable. Morell (Denholm Elliott) is witty but troubled; he’s married to a flighty stage actress. Later on arrives the friendly but immature Baker (John Warner). Ericson stays clear of the personality conflicts in the Corvette’s confined spaces.

A rough chain of command gets ironed out, and personal lives almost cease to exist in the hard duty of escorting convoys. At first there is little enemy presence, but after the Germans get the French port of Brest up and running as a U-Boat base, the convoys come under attack. No matter what the escorts do, enemy subs pick off the convoy ships. The Compass Rose is outfitted with rudimentary sonar that isn’t much help. They get no opportunities to attack, and spend most of their efforts picking up survivors. The small Corvette has no doctor so Lockhart studies up on rudimentary first aid. Sailors are rescued yet die from getting fuel oil in their lungs. The recovered dead include women naval officers, Wrens.  When breakdowns occur, Captain Ericson has no choice but to shut down his engines while the engineer Watts (Liam Redmond) makes repairs. They can only hope they won’t be spotted by a passing U-Boat. Storms can be treacherous, but it also makes them safer from torpedo attack.

The Cruel Sea ignores the rules of naval movies as concocted by Hollywood scriptwriters. The New York Times review spends paragraphs praising the film’s quality, only to conclude that it is lacking in drama. Other critics and audiences found it grippingly believable. Characters come and go as they might in war assignments, and when people die there are no ‘dramatic’ death scenes.

The daily grind of sea duty is brilliantly dramatized, despite the feeling that we’re inside a semidocumentary. Instead of a Hollywood fraternity of like-minded patriots, the officers have clashes of personality. Some have difficulty concentrating on their work.

And most of it is work and nothing else. Little time is free for the supposed ‘flavor’ of the Navy – few drinking parties and fewer opportunities to pursue women on shore. The women the officers meet when the fleet’s in are themselves sailors. Wren Virginia McKenna ( Carve Her Name with Pride) attracts one of the men but isn’t really available for trips to the pub. Unlike American movies of the time, there’s no secure apple-pie home to come back to. Some wives and sweethearts back on land live under constant threat of bombing.

The Cruel Sea is about the physical exhaustion and unyielding logic of the sea war. Improved sonar equipment is slow in coming as the numbers of German U-Boats multiply. Most engagements are again only a matter of picking up survivors. On one run so many convoy ships are lost, the subs in the wolf pack outnumber them. Nobody blames the Compass Rose; it’s just the reality all must face.

At one point Captain Ericson must make a terrible decision. He has yet to sink a single U-Boat, and the one he finally gets in his sights positions itself directly below some convoy sailors left floating in the water, possibly as a trap. Ericson feels he has no choice but to plow through the stranded men and drop depth charges. It was technically the right thing to do.  Three ship’s captains assure him that he had no choice.

But Ericson is never the same afterwards. The only consolation is the understanding of Navy command, which will accept any mistake that doesn’t end in a loss of a ship. He also has Lockhart’s support. Watching The Cruel Sea today, we can’t imagine the pressure on today’s commanders who have to make similar snap decisions in combat. How can fighting men do anything these days, when video documents their missions in real time?  Any action can be second-guessed immediately — by politicians, even the general public. Ericson at least has the leeway to act without instant corporate criticism.

After dozens of convoys, the Compass Rose is torpedoed and most of the crew are lost. Ericson can do nothing for sailors trapped below decks. In the cold North Atlantic water, the weak and even those in low spirits just fade away in a matter of minutes. Erickson and Lt. Lockhart survive and are put on a newer, larger ship outfitted with much better detection equipment. But their anti-submarine missions still meet with no great success. Things pick up only when the odds shift in favor of the Allies.

Most every American war film found ways to inject romance into the proceedings. The Cruel Sea’s more honest storyline tells us about the men’s personal lives a little bit at a time. Officer Tallow (Bruce Seton) tries to fix up the widower Watts with his sister, a lonely widow (Megs Jenkins of  The Innocents). Young Ferraby is crushed because the sadistic Bennett won’t let him visit his young wife when they’re in port. She’s played by the adorable June Thorburn, later of  The Three Worlds of Gulliver. The charming Ms. Jenkins is in for one brief scene in in her little home in the fleet’s port town. June Thorburn makes the credited cast list, yet is seen only in one shot, during a party.

Lt. Lockhart has nobody ashore, and works up the courage to talk to Wren Julie Hallam, whose beauty is known to all. She likes him, and they become an item, briefly. When the subject of a future together comes up Lockhart dashes her hopes with a pessimistic remark about not making plans in wartime. It doesn’t matter because Julie is being transferred to a different command; they might not see each other again. Only later does she get the chance to tell him that it’s important to have something to live for.

Morale is an important issue with Denholm Elliott’s Morell as well. The one time we see his actress wife (Moira Lister of  Pool of London), she’s ditching him on his only night in port, to go to a party. It’s obvious that she has another beau, which deeply affects Morell.

Captain Ericson experiences his own feelings of failure; he suffers from sense memory flashbacks of the sailors who died when the Compass Rose went down. director Frend borrows a page from William Wyler’s  The Best Years of Our Lives, using a push-in to Ericson’s anguished face as he’s haunted by voices echoing from the past. How do officers in command live with such guilt?  Ericson is advised that that’s what liquor is for.

The overriding feeling in The Cruel Sea is melancholy. Sad music accompanies the first exit from port. Arrivals and departures are marked by recurring shots of a lonely buoy as they enter and leave harbor. Characters exit without fanfare; there is no certainty of anything when a U-Boat might be aiming a torpedo. Captain Erickson and Lt. Lockhart stay together as a command team, even when Lockhart could have asked for a ship of his own. Neither man has career ambitions. The best lesson learned is that an efficient, trusting work relationship is more important than anything else in wartime.

Charles Frend’s direction imparts a sense of realism to events, an immediacy. The semi-documentary mood stays in effect even when visual effects are used. The actors come through very strongly without having to be too rigidly ‘typed.’ We don’t blame Captain Ericson for not being on top of Bennett’s persecution of the officers under his authority — good officers are trained to take whatever chain of command misery they end up with. Stanley Baker reportedly wanted the role of the hated SOB Bennett … he built his career on a foundation of despicable villains.

Carefully chosen stock shots give us a feel for combat on the high seas. The extended shot of waves behind the titles let us know that the North Atlantic in a storm is no place for sissies. Admiralty cooperation must have been extensive, as we don’t see the usual compromises of war-themed entertainment. Only one editorial choice now stands out as distractingly wrong: a view of a naval battle pulls in scenes that we recognize as kamikaze attacks on American ships in the South Pacific. But it’s just 2 or three shots, less than ten seconds in duration.

When imported to the U.S., many English films now considered classics were basically ignored, like the Archers’ superb  I Know Where I’m Going!  It was common for pictures to be seriously edited for the U.S. market. We’re not surprised that the superior  Ice Cold in Alex made no impact in America. Its distributor saw fit to cut it down from 130 minutes to just 76.

Universal-International released dozens of films from the Rank Organization but few performed as well as The Cruel Sea, aided greatly by excellent reviews. Even the Hollywood trade papers, known for a protectionist bias against foreign pictures, gave the show a rave. By all accounts it was a success here. Eric Ambler’s screenplay was nominated for an Oscar; he’d go on to write scripts for the superlative  The Purple Plain and  A Night to Remember.

The show’s success also did good things for the English cast. Jack Hawkins’ previous picture  Outpost in Malaya had been a box office no-show, despite the presence of an American star. This film brought Hawkins to the full attention of Hollywood; two years later he starred in a  big Howard Hawks epic.  Of the actors that received a UK career boost, Virginia McKenna and Donald Sinden fared the best. If we Yanks knew Sinden at all, it was for his simpering husband opposite Grace Kelly in John Ford’s  Mogambo. But back home but he almost immediately became a front-rank film star.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of The Cruel Sea is a must-have item for fans of war movies. When most US, UK and Soviet war movies were spinning feel-good tales about wartime heroics, Charles Frend’s movie related what war service must have really been like.

As written above, Kino’s excellent disc encoding may be the same as seen on a Region B Blu-ray from 14 years ago. The cut here appears to be the full original, six minutes longer than the American release — or could that be the difference from a PAL running time?  The audio is a big improvement over the earlier track, that often muffled dialogue and didn’t carry subtitles. The clear audio and subs reveals some surprisingly expressive bits of ‘shop talk’ on the Corvette, as when an officer reveals that he saw Morell’s wife in bed with another man. During a mid-voyage overhaul, a machinists’ mate says something we wouldn’t think a censor would pass, in either country. Even engineer Watts tells the sailor to mind his tongue.

The main extra is the same as on the 2011 English Blu-ray. Actor Donald Sinden talks for over half an hour, discussing the show from all aspects. It’s a valuable record from a key participant. Sinden has got to be proud of his contribution, seeing how much it did for his career.

The audio commentary is by the enthusiastic critic Simon Abrams, who dispenses plenty of information as well as a detailed book-to-film comparison. A UK trailer is included as well … it contains almost all of the film’s battle action, and carries text selling the film as a patriotic booster.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Cruel Sea
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Film Critic Simon Abrams
Interview with Sir Donald Sinden
Theatrical Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: April 6, 2025
(7310sea)

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