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| Several posters for Samuel Fuller's Hell and High Water remark that 'You see it without glasses in CinemaScope', - undoubtedly hinting at the time's short wave of 3D-film, - the first 3D-wave, - which, just as now, required that the audiences wore silly glasses |
Hell and High Water is an atomic scare action adventure sub-marine thriller about a private humanistic-scientific submarine expedition to the Pacific to check out and possibly defuse a secret, Communist nuclear weapons base on an island in the neutral zone.
The film has an exciting premise and a good set-up. It starts with footage from a real nuke going off, provided by the U.S. Government, who insisted that certain colors be altered in case they would "reveal nuclear secrets."
The plot gets constructed around the reluctant, skeptical, realist captain, played without sentimentality by Richard Widmark (Judgement at Nuremberg (1961)) and the idealistic, pacifist professor Montel, played with serenity by Victor Francen (The Big Scare (1964)). As Montel brings his co-scientist professor on-board, he reveals to the stunned submariners that the professor is a fascinating, wildly attractive woman, played by Bella Darvi (Good Little Girls (1971) in her screen debut. She is multi-lingual and never aloof and quickly becomes an object of attraction, but only as almost certain death are over them does the strong, desired captain SPOILER kiss her under the red lights.
The film has good sets and action and was Oscar-nominated for its special effects. It also has a lovely sense of what one Internet commentator calls 'moral certainty', meaning that there's no doubt the Soviets are the enemy, and that our guys are the good ones, (but also that nuclear war should be prevented).
The big challenge for director Samuel Fuller and DP Joseph MacDonald (S.O.S. Ashiya (1964)) with Hell and High Water was to show that the wide, slim CinemaScope-format could also be used to good effect in something as seemingly ill fit for it as a claustrophobic submarine plot. They do that, quite impressively, and thus proved to producer Darryl F. Zanuck that CinemaScope "could be used for anything!"
Hell and High Water is ideal as an afternoon watch, especially for fans of war movies, submarines and/or westerns.
The details:
The reasons that the film never becomes greater than it does, are that it gets long somewhere towards the end of the voyage to the island and on the island itself, and that there are some inconsistencies in the script, which also asks us to take some leaps of faith with it a few times, where I think it comes out a bit weak instead.
The ending is one such, somewhat thick and unbelievable moment, as the enemy nuclear bomber is shot down and crashes on the next island, and its bomb goes off, (why we don't know), and the captain immediately tells his favorite woman professor that her SPOILER father, professor Montel, must have died there. It seems a hurried conclusion, considering the relatively small explosion in sight, until the Government footage is then inserted again.
The film is directed by Samuel Fuller (Underworld U.S.A. (1961)), who reportedly didn't like it and only did it as a favor to Zanuck for standing up for him, when his last film Pickup on South Street (1953) was attacked by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI. Still, the film isn't at all bad work by Fuller, who added some of the film's best scenes.
Darvi was an interesting, tragic person; a miraculous WWII concentration camp survivor, who had since the war become a drunken gambler in Monaco, where she was found by Darryl F. Zanuck and his wife Virginia, who saw greatness in her and took her to Hollywood and even devised her last name Darvi from their own first names. But Darvi's acting capabilities were limited, and she had a lisp that also sometimes makes her speech hard to understand in Hell and High Water. The finality of her Hollywood career was secured with a sex scandal involving her and Darryl F. Zanuck. Mrs. Zanuck, who had treated Darvi as a kind of favorite niece, packed her bags and shipped her back to Europe. Here she made some ineffectual movie-roles and relapsed to drinking and gambling and eventually killed herself by gas in her Monaco apartment, and was only found after having been dead for ten days in 1971, 42 years old.
Watch the original, CinemaScope-pounding trailer here
Cost: 1.8 mil. $
Box office: 2.7 mil. $ (North America only)
= Uncertainty
What do you think of Hell and High Water and Samuel Fuller's movies?
Other Bela Darvi particulars are welcomed
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