The Cruel Sea (Penguin World War II Collection)

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Thumim, Janet. "The popular cash and culture in the postwar British cinema industry". Screen. Vol.32, no.3. p.259.

Vagg, Stephen (27 July 2019). "Unsung Aussie Filmmakers: Don Sharp – A Top 25". Filmink. Archived from the original on 2 August 2020 . Retrieved 14 February 2020. They both had to shout: the wind caught the words on their very lips and whipped them away into the night. I listened to this in Swedish read by Tore Bengtsson. It was clearly read and not hard to follow, but the tone put me off. It felt like it was a man reading for other men. This is kind of hard to explain, but it is the definite feeling I get. Men in the company of other men speak this way. Add the presence of women and the tone changes. The narration I have given three stars. Therefore it was an unusual and happy occasion earlier today when Martin walked with me to the Park Ridge Library booksale and I espied a copy of Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, a novel Dad had had and which I had read sometime in childhood. The title might not have been enough. The author's name meant nothing. But the cover was the very cover of Dad's edition.He was roused at one point from this tremendous concentration by someone nudging him, and he turned round to see a figure in the darkness beside him. WHAT'S NEWS IN THE MOVIE WORLD". Sunday Times. Perth: National Library of Australia. 28 November 1954. p.39. Archived from the original on 29 March 2021 . Retrieved 10 July 2012.

H.M.S. Compass Rose: Reports on Officers,” wrote the Admiral, and referred again to his notes. “Lieutenant-Commander George Eastwood Ericson, R.N.R.: Commanding Officer. This officer exhibited a high standard of seamanship, and showed himself expert at ship-handling. I judged him to be a conscientious and determined officer who, when he has gained more experience in this new class of ship, will extract everything possible out of his command. His relations with his subordinate officers appeared satisfactory, and it was clear that he inspired their confidence and would be followed by them without hesitation. He was Ericson’s decision alone. It was a captain’s moment, a pure test of nerve: it was, once again, the reality that lay behind the saluting and the graded discipline and the two and a half stripes on the sleeve. While Ericson, silent on the bridge, considered the chances, there was not a man in the ship who would have changed places wiih him. THE war to which they went had hardly settled down, even in broad outline, to any recognizable pattern. Thanks, coxswain,”he said when he had finished it. “I needed that.”He raised his binoculars again, confirmed that Compass Rose was still in station, and relaxed slightly. “What’s it like below?”It’s impossible to choose the best. The Cruel Sea, however, deserves to stand among the best. It deserves an audience. This book focuses on humans that are thrown into war from their peacetime lives. Accountants, bankers, journalists, cargo ship captains, pension seeking peacetime sailors, are all placed in a war that they, as individuals, had very little to do with its inception. From there, the changes in the characters are illustrated through the most extreme of circumstances and the ever-accumulating risk associated with time. Decisions are made and sacrifices are suffered. The enemy becomes transformed from humans with differing points of view into mere objects of resistance: worthy of a hatred that can only be bestowed upon the most inhuman of threats. And the defenders are transformed into machines that are virtually unaware of the hatred that they display.

Now that I’ve got your attention, let me say that The Cruel Sea is not the greatest war novel of all time. It is difficult to translate any full-length novel to the screen. There are too many `moments in time' to get them all in. So the adaptation of a novel by a screenwriter becomes a process of selection. Eric Ambler did his usual excellent job in writing this script, and if he left out some of the better bits, he also got the best bits in. Charles Frend directs it well within the style of the early 1950's. The special effects are above average for the time and not unacceptable by today's standards, although they are not spectacular. The film editing is clean and crisp with little to complain about. The musical score is not intrusive, but not up to the rest of the effort. It would be ten years before the art of Movie Music caught up to the rest, and here the score is no worse any other film of 1953. It is however the acting that gives this movie the push to get it far above the rest. This is nautical fiction stripped of the romance and glamour normally associated with the genre, to reveal a plot that is gritty and real. The appalling weather is as much the enemy as the circling German U-boats. It has all the elements that show what war is actually like - the boredom, the exhaustion, the relentlessness and the errors made in equal measure. Some officers are brave, others as bullies; some are dedicated, while others neglect their duty. The journey of the ship’s commanding officer, Ericson, being remorselessly ground down with fatigue and war weariness is particularly poignant. The novel, published in 1951, was an immediate success and it has never been out of print since. It brings home the realities of the longest battle in the second world war, the Battle for the Atlantic, but it does so not through harrowing depiction of the horrors involved, but through its detailed depiction the people involved, people we come to care about, to admire, and to mourn. -- BBC Radio4x THE Captain carried them all. For him, there was no fixed watch, no time set aside when he was free to relax and, if he could, to sleep. He had to control everything, to drive the whole ship himself: he had to act on signals, to fix their position, to keep his section of the convoy together, to use his seamanship to ease Compass Rose’s ordeal as much as possible. He was a tower of strength, holding everything together by sheer unrelenting guts. The sight of the tall tough figure hunched in one corner of the bridge now seemed essential to them all: they needed the tremendous reassurance of his presence, and so he gave it unstintingly, even though the hours without sleep mounted to a fantastic total.

Stand by to get those survivors inboard. We won’t lower a boat — they’ll have to swim or row towards us. God knows they can see us easily enough. Use a megaphone to hurry them up.” We were discussing the best way of dismantling the firing-bar on the asdic set.” He paused. “That’s not too technical for you?” How can it be? There’s too many classics to choose from. Antiwar masterpieces like All Quiet on the Western Front and Fear. Literary opuses such as The Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line. Big, operatic epics like Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Once you start listing them, it’s hard to stop. Catch 22. The Things They Carried. The Red Badge of Courage. Even War and Peace can be classified here. A lot of great literature exists in this genre. Monsarrat's first three novels, published in 1934–1937 and now out of print, were realistic treatments of modern social problems informed by his leftist politics. His fourth novel and first major work, This Is The Schoolroom, took a different approach. The story of a young, idealistic, aspiring writer coming to grips with the "real world" for the first time, it is at least partly autobiographical.