Down in the Depths: Destination Tokyo and the Submarine Movie

SteynonLine ^ | May 11, 2024 | Rick McGinnis

[Twotone]

It goes without saying that every war film (and a few other besides) that Hollywood made during World War Two was a propaganda film. Nobody would mistake Destination Tokyo (1943) as anything but propaganda, made by Warners, arguably the most jingoistic of the Hollywood studios, and at the moment when the tide of battle finally seemed to be turning in the Allies' favour – after the Soviet triumph at Stalingrad and the defeat of Rommel in North Africa, the Dambuster raid and the withdrawal of German U-boats from the North Atlantic.

The film looks back at the first months of America's entry into the war – a year of almost constant bad news alleviated only by the Doolittle Raid and the US victory at Midway. In her book The World War II Combat Film, Janeane Basinger puts Destination Tokyo at the end of a cycle of films that began with MGM's Bataan and included Sahara, Guadalcanal Diary and Air Force: films that broke with the form that war films had taken over previous decades and helped define WW2 pictures for audiences living through the ongoing conflict.

"Bataan," Basinger writes, "is not the work of art that Citizen Kane is, but what Kane did for form and narrative, Bataan does for the history of the combat genre. It does not invent the genre. It puts the plot devices together, weds them to a real historical event, and makes an audience deal with them as a unified story presentation – deal with them, and remember them."

Destination Tokyo begins in Washington DC, in the War Department offices that would move into the under-construction Pentagon by the time 1943 began. We watch an order get drafted and conveyed to San Francisco, to the Mare Island shipyard...

[ansel12]

From the article.

“Tony Curtis said that he was inspired to join the navy after watching Cary Grant in Destination Tokyo. Years later he’d be cast as Grant’s second in command in another sub picture, Blake Edwards’ Operation Petticoat (1959), which Basinger describes as a “feminized” version of Destination Tokyo, right down to the boat going into combat painted pink.”

[chrisinoc]

Destination Tokyo was shown briefly in a scene in Operation Pacific, a post WW2 movie submarine movie starring John Wayne.

[jonascord]

Curtis also claimed that he developed the Cary Grant accent he used in Some Like It Hot from watching the same movie several times when he was serving aboard a sub tender, along with his ship mate, Larry Storch.

[ansel12]

I knew a WWII submariner and he said that Curtis attended all the reunions (he was on a sub tender) and that everyone liked him and that it was all about the reunion and their Navy days.

[Rockingham]

The comparison between the dark closed spaces of the German submarine in Das Boot and the bright, more open interior of the US sub in Destination Tokyo has considerable accuracy. Built for deployment across the Pacific, the principal models of American subs in WW II were about twice the displacement of standard German U-boats and considerably more comfortable.

[skr]

Excellent movie. I wouldn’t be able to last a day under such claustrophobic conditions, especially submerged.

One of my favorite sub movies is The Enemy Below with Robert Mitchum as the American captain of a battle cruiser up against Curt Jurgens as the German captain of a U-boat. Battle of wits between two men fighting for their country and their crew.

[Rummyfan]

Run Silent, Run Deep is another good one.

[Twotone]

My sweetie (who passed away two years ago) spent 8 years in the Navy. He was about half of that time in submarine schools or in subs. He loved it & regretted getting out. Interestingly, he had the opposite of agoraphobia. He loved tiny, closed in spaces. There’s a job for every personality. :-)

[PUGACHEV]

I am surprised that Steyn did not mention several cliches which occur in nearly every submarine drama, from the WW2 era right up to Das Boot. There are a well-defined handful of them, but the two most common are: (1) someone develops a medical condition which requires surgery, like appendicitis, and an untrained pharmacist’s mate has to perform it. The operation is successful and the mate finds strength and greater confidence as a result of the challenge. (2) For one or another reason, the submarine finds itself stuck on the bottom and the crew is running out of air. When all seems lost, a repair is made or whatever danger it was passes and the crew is saved. However in the meantime, the crisis serves as a time for the individual crew members to reflect on their lives, missed opportunities, and regrets.