A merchant ship is torpedoed while shepherding a convoy of supplies across the Atlantic. Survivors sit in a lifeboat a thousand miles from land. They aim for Portugal, but dwindling supplies, the weather, and the menace of a German U-boat threaten them all with death. This is one of the milestones of British wartime cinema: a near seamless fusion of documentary material and the commercial feature film format, surprisingly and gloriously photographed in Technicolor at a time when British audiences chiefly associated rich colouring with Carmen Miranda’s fruit-bowl hats and other Hollywood dreams. Documentary director Pat Jackson, whose first feature this was, took great efforts to avoid studio artifice. For actors, he picked nothing but serving members of the Allied Forces and Merchant Fleets. He let the sailors’ dialogue flow in the chaotic fashion of real life. And though the U-boat interiors were shot on dry land in a studio, he never once used the studio tank. The scenes of the Atlantic convoy in action were shot on the spot, in some danger. For the lifeboat sequences, actors, director, the lumbering Technicolor camera, sound equipment and technicians were all fitted into the same cramped lifeboat, bobbing about on the sea. Only the sound recordist was accommodated separately, on the unseen drifter used to pull the lifeboat through the water. Admittedly, the water was off the coast of Wales, not in the middle of the Atlantic, but the lurchings and discomforts day after day, month after month, were still real enough to make every technician, except Jackson, regularly seasick. The weather caused constant photographic problems with light exposures and continuity. But Jack Cardiff, at the time the one director of photography in Britain with sustained Technicolor experience, worked wonders with the elements, overlaying the seamen’s drama with an almost abstract symphony of greys, blues, and greens. Pinpricks of other colours come and go: the white spray of sea foam; the orange heat of the setting sun; the gold braid on an officer’s arm; and, not to be forgotten in this still emotionally powerful film, the brown horror of British tea, strong and comforting, poured from a pot.

Geoff Brown