CORVETTE K-225

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 244, 25 February 1944, Page 25

CORVETTE K-225

(Universal)

ERE is another Hollywood war picture that also makes a mistake, but of a different kind. It takes the war seriously, for it is a drama of the Cana-

dian corvettes on convoy service in the Atlantic, but it does not take it seriously enough to exclude all those cinematic clichés which immediately bring the story down from the level of gripping realism to that of "just another war picture." Corvette K-225 is, in fact, caulked to the gunwales with hokum. The little ship itself is real; you are interested in its narrow escapes, its desperate and heroic battles with submarines. The submarines are real enough too; and heroic also in their way, for when one considers it dispassionately there can hardly be any more terrible assignment than that of running the gauntlet of depthcharges to attack an armed convoy. It is the crew of the corvette that is pure Hollywood. Now I know that the men who man the ships are human beings; that they have their conflicts and feuds and the girls they've left behind them. And these are the things we want, and expect, to see in any film about ships, as well as battles, storms, and escapes. But must they always adhere exactly to the same pattern of sentimental melodrama? The

crew of Corvette K-225 have served in practically every sea story that Hollywood has ever launched. Here is the tight-lipped captain (Randolph Scott), in love with the girl (Ella Raines) who has accused him of sending her elder brother to his death; here is the young-man-who-won’t-take-discipline, the girl’s younger brother, a raw officer who must learn the hard way; here is the blarneying Irishman (Barry Fitzgerald); and here is the comic relief in the form of the two buffoons (Andy Devine and Fuzzy Knight) who fight together unceasingly but would die for one another. That they are all here is, I should guess, because Corvette K-225 is the "mighty production" of Howard Hawks, and not because it was made with the "enthusiastic co-operation" of the Royal Canadian Navy. I rather wish it had been left entirely to the R.C.N. and somebody like John Grierson-but audiences will possibly not agree.