![]() ![]() Though he’s had experience with logistically complex TV movies, his feature background is largely in intense character studies like The Consequence and Black and White as Days and Nights, and picking him to direct the biggest budget, mass-audience film in his country’s history is a bit like choosing John Cassavetes to direct Jaws. Hiring someone like Wolfgang Petersen to direct Das Boot is the European factor. “I wanted to force the cameraman to shoot the whole film in this tube - I wanted the audience not to see this as decoration but to feel that we are all totally in this boat for months and months.” And though the boat was constructed so that its walls could be pulled back to allow, in director Wolfgang Petersen’s words, “someone to sit back comfortably in a chair with a cigar in his mouth and say, ‘Action,'” he insisted on shooting in the enclosed space to ensure reality. While movie submarines have invariably looked like hotel rooms with periscopes in the middle, this one is fanatically authentic, down to the last rivet. Most of the money, however, was spent on the creation from scratch of that U-boat interior. The result is a series of vivid outdoor action sequences that will deceive even the sharpest eye. In addition to two full-size submarines, for instance (one used for exteriors, the other for interiors), three fully detailed scale models were built, including a thirty-five-foot oceangoing job that could cruise as well as dive on remote-control command. And that sum was not spent on star salaries but in pursuit of verisimilitude, to purchase the kind of technical skill that used to be the exclusive domain of Hollywood. ![]() ![]() Das Boot cost more than $12 million, not eye-catching by domestic standards but enough to make it the most expensive German film ever made. The American approach is, to be blunt, the spending of money without shame. What really separates this film from its predecessors is not country of origin but a pair of creative decisions - one distinctly European, the other traditionally American - made by the film’s German producers to give their conventional material as high a gloss as it could stand. ![]() 2, the psycho in the engine room, the shared terror of attack by pesky depth charges, and enough male bonding and hearty camaraderie to fill a year’s worth of Boy’s Life - it’s all so familiar from all those American and British films with pleasantly poetic titles like Run Silent, Run Deep, Above Us the Waves, and The Enemy Below that the switch in nationality is hardly noticeable. How could we be? The brave, enigmatic captain, his loyal No. But except for a single shot of drowning English-speaking sailors - done in by one of the U-96’s torpedoes -we are never aware of the sub’s crew, who are mostly apolitical or anti-Nazi to begin with, as the enemy. A very traditional war movie done with the most rigorous attention to both physical and psychological realism, Das Boot is the submarine movie to end all submarine movies, a genre film that, like a child thriving under discipline, makes more out of its inherent limitations than less restricted movies manage with all the freedom in the world.īased on Lothar-Gunther Buchheim’s widely read, semiautobiographical novel about a journalist’s experiences on German U-boat 96 cruising the North Atlantic in the autumn of 1941, Das Boot‘s most obvious departure from the norm for American audiences is that it makes do with Them instead of Us as heroes. This story of men at war under the sea has hardly a newly minted plot device or character trait to its name, yet rarely has familiar material been put together with such verve and dash. But there is stealing and there is stealing, petty larceny as well as the grandest of theft, and into that enticing latter category falls Das Boot (The Boat). Genre, a perceptive man said, is just another word for stealing. ![]()
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