Hell Boats (1970)

Admirable film.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This action adventure has American Lt. Commander Jeffords(James Franciscus), serving with the British Royal Army being sent on a dangerous mission to Malta. His top secret assignment is to take command of a flotilla of motor torpedo boats and use them to destroy a Nazi glider bomb depot on Sicily. Jeffords is distracted, but not totally, by a naked woman, Alison(Elizabeth Shepard), swimming in the sea. Romance will begin to flare, only to flame out, when the American finds out that the woman is the wife of his immediate commander(Ronald Allen).This movie is actually filmed in Malta; scenery is nothing to speak of. HELL BOATS seems to have no real ambition and could easily be described as both dull and unmemorable. If there is any redemption, it is Miss Shepard providing some sizzle in a wet shirt. The cast also features: Mark Hawkins, John Heller, Magda Konopka, Takis Emmanuel and Reuven Bar-Yotam.

I've become fascinated by the small-scale war of coastal craft in WW2 - the nightly battles between allied and axis fast light craft, the buccaneering nature of some of the commanders and the stoicism and bravery of the crews on both sides fighting with grim and unrecognised heroism.When I realised Hell Boats was showing on C5 I turned it on, missing the first 20 minutes or so. Unfortunately this is a horribly creaky drama, and doesn't do any favours to realism. It's basically ridiculous, even allowing for the terrible model work, with German "E Boats" (actually called S-Boats) that don't look remotely like the real thing. The hero and his mate plus comedy partisans and eye-candy sneak into a German port and shoot their way out....{SPOILER} At the low point of three men with pistols capturing an "E Boat" I gave up.A disappointment. I'm sure there is a great film to be made about the coastal war, but this isn't it.

I adore Hell Boats, unapologetically.The plot's engine or conceit concerns a naval officer (Lieutenant Commander Jeffords) planning to destroy a German glider bomb depot in Augusta, Sicily, with his flotilla of motor torpedo boats (MTBs). Whilst preparing for this attack in a Malta under tourniquet, he becomes part of a love triangle. You could point out that it seems like a film where there were opposing creative forces at work, so that the parting shot of the movie, the final line of the script, falls like seed on marble. You could point out that in this movie, fairly inert objects seem to have an alchemical propensity for explosive combustibility when hit by bullets and that highly trained military individuals don't understand lines of fire, that Wehrmacht soldiers pointing machine guns at the back of spies magically fizz out of existence during a crunch, that Jeffords has a mage-like ability to become invisible in front of the enemy. You could point all this out but miss the beauty and oozing anguish of the film.I just like the honesty of the film, the portrayal of lonely people living with death wishes, confronting raw sexual compatibility when unavailable, making sentimental love choices, envying, being hypocrites, behaving petulantly. It's all baked under the Mediterranean sun, shot beautifully, and scored wonderfully. The film is as much about what is unsaid or not shown and merely alluded to than what is heard and shown.There's something crazy about watching these three creatures with irises like arctic meltwater, treading over Malta's quiet places, under the sandstone shadows, in and about its crenellations. The film seems much more in keeping with the tradition of Marguerite Duras and India Song than with typical World War II genre movies; Malta almost feeling like Camus's Oran.What's also quite clear though is that the action that happens, whilst sometimes making a few elementary mistakes, often achieves with model work alone, a "Boy's Own" intensity, that makes following aerial bombs down in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor seem academic.It's well worth pointing out that director Paul Wendkos was in the Navy in World War II, and this film clearly meant a lot more to him than his usual fairly undistinguished output. Composer Frank Cordell served in military intelligence in the Mediterranean theatre during WWII and it would be fascinating to find out if he also had some influence as he was very much an engaged artistic collaborator.Rarely is a film as human as Hell Boats.

This movie surprised me. I enjoyed it more than I expected that I would. The film seemed older than it was—it used tropes and motives from earlier war films but they almost work here. The music and clichés simply echo another, earlier time. One almost laughs at the sex scenes and the confrontations between the two competitors. The heavy use of music, in particular, seems too studied.Yet, Franciscus brings intelligence and understatement to his roll as the protagonist. He underplays sufficiently to give an illusion of depth to his character.Elizabeth Sheppard, playing Allison, is fetching. She too underplays her part in a convincing way. Ronald Allen plays off both of them in ways that makes the interplay interesting. The director Paul Wendkos knows how to produce a creditable film narrative. Still, this is not Bergman.This is a seventies movie that looks and sounds like a black and white film from the forties.Special effects are, at best, studied (that word again) and not all that believable. One forgets how new scuba gear was at the time the movie is set.By the way, one understands how Magda Konopka married a billionaire. She looks terrific here.