Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Movie review - "The Frogmen" (1951) **

There are no women in the cast of this WW2 action film which might explain why Fox cast some of their young hunks (Jeffrey Hunter and Bob Wagner) and have a lot of the cast run around topless wearing tight shorts - anything to get the teeny boppers in. While there is some novelty of having a film about underwater divers in the war (who do their missions only wearing shorts - which threw me until I realised wet suits probably hadn't been invented), it's not much of a story. 

The guts of it is about new commander Richard Widmark sulking his crew respect their former officer, who was killed and who we never meet. Dana Andrews phones it in in a nothing role as a chief mate and scenes of people swimming underwater are shown yet again to be not that exciting on film. 

There's some decent action stuff above the water, which is done in a semi documentary style - I liked the touch of Hunter being wounded sticking up a gag sign for marines, that felt real. But it's too run of the mill on the whole.

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