The Enemy Below – 1957 (WINNER)
I’ll start this review off by saying that I only give the special effects three stars because it has all been done before. Really? Another WWII war movie? Another volley of explosions and gunfire? More scale models of battleships and submarines? There was nothing new here. There’s no denying that it was all done well, but where’s the creativity? Where’s the innovation?
The answer is that visually, there was none. The film was nominated based solely on the audio effects, and when it came to those, the film gives us some interesting sound effects. Not so much in the sounds of watery explosions, but in the sounds of the submarine moving under the water. It was in the sounds of the torpedoes speeding through the waves. It was in the pinging sound of the sonar equipment as the American sailors desperately tried to locate the German sub.
I guess I have to admit that I know very little about the sound category. What makes for good sound or bad? What made this movie stand out? Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer. I can only comment on what I can hear with my uneducated ears, and to be honest, I couldn’t hear anything particularly special. Fortunately, there are experts who know better what to listen for than I .
There was an interesting scene in which the German Captain had his men sing a loud patriotic song, which the American Captain picked up on his radio equipment. The garbled sound effectively confuses the Allies. The faint water dampened sounds of the depth charges exploding near the submarine were appropriately ominous. And the soft whirring sound of the torpedo propellers was interesting.
Visually, there isn’t much on which I can comment. The above water evidence of the underwater explosions were pretty realistic, but that wasn’t much of a surprise. The US Navy supplied them with actual depth charges. They were all real. Unfortunately, the realistic scale models of the nautical vessels on both sides were given away, once again, by the unrealistic water filmed at close range.
Then there was one sequence of shots that were particularly awful. So the sub has surfaced, and has been disabled, and the battleship turns to ram it. Captain Stolberg is standing on the sub’s deck watching the approach of the American ship. He is in perfect focus, while the rear-projected burning battleship, water, and sky are all badly out of focus and incredibly grainy. It looked very fake.
And so I come back to my old question? Why were there only two movies being nominated for the category each year? Surely there must have been plenty of movies that were pushing the boundaries of what was possible in movie magic. Why weren’t any of them considered for the Oscar?