Cruisers : a Tale of two Movies
This is a piece about TV or ships or TV movies; perhaps all that. About a year ago while flipping channels on my resolutely broadcast TV (I don't do cable) I came across an old movie that seemed to be one I had watched, thirty years before. A singular or small group of plucky Brits take on a German warship. It turned out it was actually a different movie which just deepened the experience, made it more of a mystery, more fun.
I grew up with bad television, but it isn't bad prime time television that I remember particularly or fondly. Rather the avalanche of old reruns every afternoon of the previous decade's television. An even greater entertainment; though, was old movies, especially during the period when TV stations weren't too self-conscious to air black and white movies. That lasted about ten years into the sale of color televisions. Then Turner broadcasting decided they would "colorize" any remaining movies they cared to air or license. At one stroke 10,000 movies disappeared from popular culture. Some came dribbling back through VHS editions, some made the rounds of dedicated cable channels. Places where a candle in the window still burned for George Raft. I've never had cable, didn't even have a VHS machine until 1998 (I now have my sister Susan's vhs collection as she moved on to dvd and now Netflix). As the modern age deepened the movies one might find on TV, on a UHF channel on a Saturday, or late at night grew as a set and became acceptably tolerable. The element of find is critical, the happenstance, the serendipitous nature. The casual dismissability, the easy ability to turn it off if it gets tedious, or something else needs to be done. The history of movie programming in television is fascinating and I know of at least one book undertaking an academic study of the dynamics Hollywood in the age of television (Book, 1990) which I glanced through as I copy-cataloged it into U Md's broadcast archive collection.
Even worse I enjoyed the New Bad Television era. Which is my name for the glut of new production syndicated television. This is a somewhat aging enthusiasm now, but I fondly recall Bruce Campbell, Tia Carrera, Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda (Lexa Doig, Keith Cobb), Cleopatra 2525, and Lost World. Bruce Campbell is of course back in "Burn Notice" a cable show which ch. 20 (the remnant of the mighty WB/UPN empire) is kind enough to broadcast in syndication on Wednesdays. Things are now looking up again with the move of TV from analog to DTV; every channel gets a handful of side-channels and in the expansion of the medium, broadcast gains a share of puzzling sport or local interest channels, as well as deliberate retro TV like RTN or Antenna TV and dedicated movie channels like the This channel.
This is where this story starts. On such a channel I found a movie where Roger Moore and Lee Marvin along with Barbara Perkins are conniving to blow up a German warship full of sauerkraut-eating proto-Nazi's. They succeed, and it is ever so picturesque when they do. I came in around a half hour from the end. I realized by the end that it was not the movie I had seen twenty minutes of thirty years before, and I didn't manage to catch the name of this movie as the credits ran. The next day I went over to IMDB to try to sort all this out. The two movies I determined after a while were Shout at the Devil from 1976, and Sailor of the King from 1953. There are some parallels in these movies about blowing up ships. The two movies are based on books about naval battles concerning German light cruisers in world war i, both movies add a foreground story to a actual historic incident and changed or obscured the names of the ships, location and other facts.
The movie Shout at the Devil (film) weaves in a complex plot about man and his daughter an American adventurer and thuggish acquisitive Germans. The film changed the ship to the larger, older and more gothic battlecruiser SMS Blucher. How much of the historical liberties originated with the book or the film I don't know. Also changed was the location from the flat hot and undifferentiated jungle of the Rufiji Delta, in Tanganyika, the film was still set in Tanzania but actually filmed on the rugged and incredibly beautiful Umzimvubu river near Port St. Johns, Cape Hermes Transkei South Africa. This is where I'd go if I ever had a honeymoon to go on. The historical incident was the Battle of Rufiji Delta - Wikipedia, on the Rufiji River, Tanzania, July 1915. Involving the light cruiser SMS Konigsberg versus British cruisers, land forces, some airplanes, and two monitors brought around from Malta. The SMS Konigsberg had attempted some commerce raiding in the Indian Ocean, but unforgivably had sunk the light cruiser HMS Pegasus in Zanzibar Harbor in September of 1914. By November of 1914 the British Navy had trapped the Konigsburg, but were unable to get up river to shell her This led to a long miserable campaign to put the ship out of action. Which they finally managed six months later sinking her with the aid of the monitors. Monitors were ships that looked like dwarf battleships, being essentially large gun turrets mounted on barges.
The movie I had mistook Shout at the Devil for was Sailor of the King - Wikipedia, which is based on the book Brown on Resolution by C.S. Forester author of the Captain Hornblower series (who also wrote the book African Queen which is uniquely about two plucky civilians trying to sink a German warship). Sailor of the King was actually the second movie based on Brown and switched the time period from the first World War to the second. There are apparently alternate endings; in the American release Brown survives, this version also carries the title Single-Handed. In the book and UK release his resolution is -to the end. Signalman Brown, hero as ordinary seaman as Forester envisioned him, was played by Jeffrey Hunter who later went on to become the first captain of the starship Enterprise for Gene Roddenberry, but turned down continuing in the role, which was recast for William Shatner. The historical incident was the Battle of Mas a Tierra - Wikipedia, and the demise of the SMS Dresden at the Chilean island of Mas a Tierra (Robinson Crusoe island) during 8-15 March 1915. A German Task force was scattered after battle of the Falkland Islands in the opening days of the war. The light cruiser SMS Emden escaped into the west Pacific and Indian ocean for a legendary commerce raiding spree (before being sunk eventually by the HMAS Sydney). SMS Dresden low on coal was cornered by British cruisers HMS Glasgow and Kent and sunk at Cumberland Bay. In the movie Brown whose ship has just been sunk harasses and prevents the quick repair of the German ship until the Royal Navy shows up.
By the time of these battles all the ships in these stories were around 5 to 10 years old in naval architecture design. The German ships suffered by having coal burning boilers at a time when warship technology was transitioning to oil. Coal was less efficient by weight and the refueling process took significantly longer and with the presence of coal dust was far more dangerous. All European navies were shuttling through ship design iterations rapidly, part of an overall extreme naval arms race. There was considerable uncertainly about the merits of the various armament arrangements and machinery such as the new steam turbine systems. These ships at any rate were superior to the US light cruiser design of the period, the USS Chester class. Although one of those ships the USS Birmingham had been the first warship to launch an airplane, that was one hundred years ago last November.
I can round this out with one additional really random fact. I was copy cataloging a book of Paul Signac"s late period water colors into U. Md's collection a month or so ago. Signac famously painted "Portrait of Felix Fenton" in 1890 a work seeming to predict the pop art of the 1960's. The book was: Signac : les ports de France. (Book, 2010). One watercolor featured a cruiser sailing out of a harbor - which I attempted to identify, believing such a thing possible. The ship name given in the painting's title did not correspond to any French warship I could identify, but appeared to match the name of a minister in the French government of the time. I chalk this up to an aqua-tinted inside joke for lack of better information. The ship itself appeared to be the Suffren or one of her sister ships, a French heavy cruiser : French cruiser Suffren - Wikipedia. The Suffren was later known for an heavily disputed incident in 1946 [Vietnam - Google Books p. 47] where it or a pair of Corvettes under its protection bombarded the city of Haiphong, killing as many as 2000 Vietnamese citizens, allowing Marxist leader Nguyen Sinh Cung (later known as Ho Chi Minh) to sweep the nationalists aside turning his people permanently against the west initiating the first Indochinese war. No one appears to have made a movie of this yet.
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