Ford’s growing passion for the U.S. Navy, evident in Salute, was further expressed in Men Without Women (1930), a peacetime drama about crewmen trapped on a doomed submarine, and Seas Beneath (1931), a seriocomic World War I naval combat yarn. (Ford was commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1934 and eventually became a rear admiral.) Starring his stalwart silent leading man George O’Brien, whose career in talkies soon faltered and left him mired mostly in B Westerns, Seas Beneath is most remarkable today for its extensive footage shot at sea. The semidocumentary realism of this early-sound film is striking as Ford and his ace cinematographer Joseph H. August vividly capture the atmosphere of life on an actual navy ship and the prolonged tension of conflict on the ocean from the sailors’ point of view. O’Brien, always a strong physical presence but usually a bit stiff in his delivery of dialogue, seems more relaxed in this vehicle than in other talkies, perhaps because of the rough-and-ready filming style. Here he is the commander of a navy “Mystery Ship,” or Q boat, disguised as a merchant schooner to fool the crew of a German U-boat. While the scenes involving female spies are mostly hokum, Seas Beneath remains enjoyable because of its lively sense of actually being there with the jovial O’Brien and his whimsicallyassembled crew of Fordian irregulars. The combat scenes are distinguished as well by a lack of jingoism and by Ford’s characteristic sense of camaraderie between enemies. The film’s melancholy final shot is reminiscent of the endings of such diverse Ford films as Hangman’s House and The Searchers.

“That [submarine-refueling-at-sea sequence] was good, and so was the battle stuff, but the story was bad; it was just a lot of hard work, and you couldn’t do anything with that girl [Marion Lessing]. Then later they cut the hell out of it.” 
(Ford in Peter Bogdanovich’s John Ford)