It was just a B-grade submarine movie (or maybe all sub movies are B-grade), a vehicle for John Wayne, whose drawling virility I always resent, while Patricia Neal plays his ex-wife, though off-screen her lover Gary Cooper visited the set to try to persuade her to abort their fetus. And after all the khaki, depth charges and dud torpedoes, while they’re sitting together in a Honolulu nightclub, at the very moment when her dazed come-hither look was on my last nerve, somehow the writer-director throws himself a life-ring, on this property where the hero keeps returning like a commuter, and borrows a few lines from the The Odyssey, so Neal as Lieutenant (j.g.) Mary Stuart reaches way back and, not missing a beat while talking about a young pilot, says to Duke, He wants to go someplace where they never heard of the Navy. His idea is to fly back to Wichita, Kansas and start walking inland carrying a pair of oars and stop when he gets to a place where someone says, “What is that anyway you’ve got on your shoulders?” a place where they never season the food with salt, and then he’ll know that his wandering’s done, that’s it. He’ll die in his own bed surrounded by family. And although the reference goes right over Duke’s head, it did feel somehow as if a black hull had surfaced nearby, its teak decks sieving the creamy runnels of salt, to watch a broken-backed freighter in its death agony: and you could have knocked me flat for just a moment, that prophecy of peace after so much war definitely the last thing I would have looked for amid all the routine lies of postwar Cold War Hollywood.
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