MartinHafer "Away All Boats" is a very good war film that celebrates the work of a WWII Attack Transport ship, the PA 22 'Belinda'. While the ship itself is fictional, it does a great service to the boats just like it-- boats that served with distinction even though they weren't the 'prestige' ships, such as cruiser, battleships and the like. Unfortunately, I'd like to score this one higher but can't...and I'll get to that in a bit. When the film begins, the new skipper of the ship, Captain Hawks (Jeff Chandler) arrives aboard the Belinda. What follows is the story of how the Captain took a crew of mostly inexperienced seamen and turned them into an efficient fighting force. It follows them from their rocky beginning to their first battles to the ship's, as well as the Captain's, last.The film is exciting and works well...mostly. I loved how the film humanized the men but also celebrated their exploits in a realistic and exciting manner. BUT, there is a small portion of the film that simply doesn't fit at all and was obviously tossed in later...and had nothing to do with the picture!!! At one point, one of the crew members starts thinking about his wife...and you see a montage with irrelevant footage of one of Universal's newest starlets, Julie Adams. And, for this unimportant and small portion, Adams received billing way above many of the talented actors that actually belonged in the film! I can only assume some bone-headed exec thought 'we got a war movie with only guys...we need a woman in order to attract female viewers' and thus the Adams sequence. Dumb and sad because without it the film would have earned at least an 8. The film is quite well made and tense...and reminiscent of an excellent film made around the same time, "Run Silent, Run Deep".

inspectors71 There was a time that I would watch any war movie I could find. A Saturday afternoon on KHQ in Spokane would have either the "Creature Features" or something else innocuous and old, like Away All Boats, a movie that boasted being the most expensive film ever made by its studio or Hollywood, back in 1956.Having read the book and seen the movie (probably a dozen times), it would be fair to say that it's one of my favorites, the story an attack transport in the Pacific War, captained by a man who wants to command a real warship, but is willing to pay his dues first.It's all so vanilla, with every darn stereotype you can imagine, only on a big, lumbering freighter instead of in a foxhole. The skipper is wound too tight, the XO can't figure him out, the officers and men hate him, and they're all up to the task when the Kamikazes show up and turn the Belinda into a big, lumbering piece of almost scrap iron.It is fun watching and identifying all the character actors who man the guns in this classically antiseptic, very '50s, WWII shootemup. The special effects are pretty impressive, what with a lot of the ships the US Navy lent to the film makers still in service. Modern kiddies might groan at the matte photography of Japanese Zeroes hurtling in to smash the Belinda into a blazing hulk, but I still have an image burned (pun intended) in my memory of Jeff Chandler screaming at the oncoming plane, waving as if he could by force of will make the crippled plane and its Jihadist pilot miss, "Get away from my ship, get AWAY from MY ship!" Strong stuff.That scene made Away All Boats step up a rung on the quality-meter and makes me recommend it to you, if you can find it in the "classics" section of your larger video store.

marxi Away All Boats is a World War II movie about men at sea. The first time I watched it, I thought it was rather slow moving. I've now seen it 5 times, and it gets better every time. I catch something new each time I watch it. I'm looking forward to seeing it again. How did I miss so much the first time I saw it? I now love the pace of this movie and see that it is well suited to telling the story. The photography is great and sometimes even spectacular in Away All Boats. There are also some nice moments of humor in this movie. I recommend this one. 8/10.

graz-2 The movie does an excellent job of depicting not only the horrors of war, but the boredom of long periods at sea, the agony of being apart from your loved ones, and the sacrifices United States Navy Sailors have made, more so than any other service, throughout history to the present day.