Hell and High Water (1954)

The first time I encountered this film, many years ago, when I was probably in my late teens, I only caught the last few minutes of a Sunday afternoon screening on BBC1.  All I saw was the crew of what looked like a World War Two era submarine shooting down what looked like a B-29 bomber as it flew low over them.  The plane caught fire and crashed into a small island, a nuclear explosion following.  A quick cut back to the sub revealed the captain to be Richard Widmark, before Alfred Newman's typically stirring score swelled up over the end credits.  To say I was confused would be to put it mildly.  If Richard Widmark was in command of the sub, did that mean it was a US sub?  If so, why were they shooting down a US bomber?  Why weren't the crew in uniform?  Who were the good guys in all this?  This last turned out to be a pertinent question when I finally caught up with the film - which turned out to be Sam Fuller's Hell and High Water (1954) - in its entirety.

On the surface, Hell and High Water might seem to be just another typical Cold War era flag waving Commie-basher of an adventure movie, (albeit with better production values, Cinemascope and De Luxe colour).  The trailer does nothing to dispel this impression, with its emphasis upon the action elements and the sexual tension aspect of one woman among twenty nine men on board a submarine.  But this is a Sam Fuller directed film, which means that things just aren't that simple.  From the outset, it becomes clear that the film is presenting us with an interrogation of the very notions of patriotism and loyalty which the trailer implies underpin the scenario.  Although ostensibly our hero, Richard Widmark's World War Two veteran ex-USN sub commander turns out to be a mercenary - motivated to join a secret mission funded and set up by an unofficial organisation of scientists purely by money.  Throughout the film, this motivation never changes, even when at the climax, he stumbles across a Red Chinese plot to drop a nuclear bomb on Korea from a Soviet-built Tu-4 disguised as a USAF B-29, his motivation is self-preservation rather than patriotism.  The goes for his motley international crew. (which includes a fine roster of character actors, including the incomparable Cameron Mitchell, a good actor who made so many bad movies that, by his own admission, he lost count and couldn't even remember some of them).

Motivation is also key to the scientific group that organises the expedition to a remote island in the arctic circle where they suspect the Chinese of testing nuclear weapons.  These men have foresaken their nationalities, (they have all disappeared and are suspected by the authorities of the 'free world' to have defected behind the Iron Curtain), in order to pursue the 'greater good'.  Only outside of the confines of simple patriotism, they believe, can they begin to addressthe threat posed to the world by nuclear weapons, whose proliferation has been driven on all sides in the name of 'patriotism'.  But far from the airy fairy intellectuals usually portrayed in such films, these are practical men - they have no illusions that the kind of men they need to crew their salvaged World War Two Japanese submarine will be interested only in material rewards for risking their lives, rather than being motivated by idealism.

While the counterpointing of idealism and materialism might be one of the film's main themes, it is equally interested in the tension between the intellectualism of the scientists and the practicality of the mercenaries.  Widmark plays a typically bone-headed anti-intellectual action man of the kind to be found in many fifties action movies, his opinions, not just on science and idealism, but also women, coming straight out of the stone age. ("What makes a woman who looks like that get mixed up with science?" he asks Professor Montel of the latter's female assistant - later revealed to be his daughter).  Much of the film is a dialectic Widmark and the Professor as to the means and motivations behind the mission.  All of which, of course, reflects the ambiguous relationship between science and the general population during this era: on the one hand scientists are treated with suspicion, as it is their intellectualism and idealism which has unleashed and helped propagate the nuclear threat, but on the other, they are also saviours for having provided the 'free world' with the ultimate weapon against its enemies in the first place.

Interestingly, Hell and High Water was a film that fuller was reluctant to direct, only agreeing after being allowed to rewrite the script.  It sits uneasily in his canon of usually slightly off-beat, non-conformist cinema, but as we've seen, it is really quite subversive beneath its apparently flag waving Cold War surface.  In part, Fuller made the movie as a favour to Twentieth Century Fox studio chief Darryl F Zanuck in return for the latter's defence of him after FBI Director's attacks on his previous film, Pick Up on South Street (which had also questioned the true motivations of those performing 'patriotic' services). For the studio, the film was an opportunity to showcase its Cinemascope widescreen process, demonstrating that it wasn't just for shooting historical epics, but could also be deployed to advantage in a film where much of the action takes place in the claustrophobic interior of a submarine.  Despite the studio production values. (the miniatures work, in particular, is magnificent by the standards of its day), Hell and High Water remains, distinctively, a Sam Fuller film, with that characteristic scrappy B-movie look, muscular masculinity and pulpy feel.  Indeed, its sensationalist scenario could easily have been ripped from the pages of a contemporary men's adventure magazine and the garish colour palette of the Technicolor-De Luxe processing lends the production the look and feel of a pulp magazine cover painting.

All-in-all, Hell and High Water, (which has recently turned up as part of the Talking Pictures TV schedule), is well worth a viewing.  If you can get past the superficial Cold War posturings, it turns out to be a rewarding experience, peddling a surprisingly subversive message for its era - that excessive patriotism and allegiances to narrow national identities is the true threat to peace.  The Red Chinese villains, for instance, pose a threat due to their blind adherence not to Communism, but rather to a patriotic fervour which drives them to pursue the use of nuclear weapons in order to gain advantage over their enemies.  The world, the film seems to argue, is safest when guided by those who eschew nationalism, refusing to serve the flag of a single nation.  Even mercenaries like Widmark's captain are, it seems, preferable to patriots - at least their motivation is transparent.  Culminating with a nuclear explosion, the film leaves the last word to the Professor, (who had sacrificed himself in order to give the sub advance warning of the bomber's take-off), whose earlier observation, now feeling even more pertinent is repeated: "Each man has his own reason for living and his own price for dying".  With that, Alfred Newman's magisterial score (recycled from The Fighting Lady) sweeps in, almost as a reproach to the often grubby goings on which have unfolded over the past hundred and three minutes.