Up Periscope and Down Tools. Tricky. It's a decent film, lovely to look at with its scope photography and technicolor palettes, James Garner and Edmond O'Brien are holding court in the acting stakes, and of course this being a submarine war film it has the requisite claustrophobic feel. Yet it never really gels as a whole, submerging too far into the mundane to play out a whole bunch of sequenc...

As a kid, I always loved submarine films. As a weapon of war, they aways provided a great vehicle for an adventure - great atmosphere, murky depths and torpedos that seemed very rarely to hit what they were aimed at! Best of all, though, there was positively no room at sea, on the boat, for any slushy romance!! This film opens with James Garner ("Braden") doing his best impression of the beach sce...