deschreiber The over-excited reviews here on IMDb surprise me, as I found this movie only barely worth watching. Mostly I enjoyed the real-life sequences of vintage ships steaming, exploding, and sinking. But the love story, which completely dominates everything else, is ordinary pot-boiler stuff, about a girl torn between two men, deciding who "needs" her more. Finally, though, one of the guys sacrifices himself in order to be a hero (sigh, fade to black). The love story really tanks, though, whenever Madge Evans is forced to try to sound real and impassioned with one of her "I love you truly, truly" speeches. The comic relief by Jimmy Durante might have been very welcome for 1930s audiences, but his eyeball-popping, head-shaking, and and "Hachaaa!"s look forced and pathetic today. His scene with the boxing kangaroo is a stupid interruption. (I couldn't help thinking how dangerous it would be if the roo made one of his little kicks really count for something.)Now about the writing--did somebody here mention a "literate" script? Please. Its literacy may be measured with examples like these:"Are you all right?" Wiping blood from his nose, "You think this is ketchup, do you?"Trying to fix a leak spewing water into the sub, "Somebody left the bathtub on."All this is not to say The Hell Below is terrible. It's probably a cut above the average war movie of its era (How many war movies were made in the early 30s, anyway?), but if you're looking it up on IMDb to get a sense of whether you should put aside time to watch it, my advice is not to give it a very high priority. Leave it for some late night when you have insomnia. You'll be grateful for it then.

Robert J. Maxwell It's World War I and a US submarine under the command of Walter Huston is battling German destroyers and minelayers in the Atlantic.There's a rather routine romantic plot. Huston's executive officer is Robert Montgomery. He meets and falls in love with Huston's daughter, Madge Evans, and vice versa. It's only later that he discovers she's already married to a paraplegic RAF (or RFC) officer. Evans is perfectly willing to leave her bedridden husband because she's truly in love with Montgomery. Of course when Huston discovers the affair -- and it WAS physical because of the emphatic way Montgomery delivers lines about "we were in each other's arms" -- he's extremely disturbed and protests the arrangement.Already at odds with Huston, Montgomery defies him at sea, manages to get himself cashiered from the navy, then rediscovers his conscience and completes a self-sacrificial mission that saves many lives.The romance is dull, but the scenes at sea are surprisingly well done. Even the visual effects, primitive by today's standards, aren't jarring in their lack of verisimilitude. The scenes aboard the boat are interesting technologically. We've all gotten used to the equipment on the submarines of World War II. At least I think we have. There seems to be hundreds of them lurking about, surfacing on TV from time to time.It's curious to see that in the first world war, the equipment available looked quite different but did just about the same jobs. It's also a little amusing to see that the submarines of the day were subject to the same sorts of perils as those of the World War II movies -- strafed by enemy fighters, depth-charged by destroyers, bombed by enemy bombers, firing back with small arms on deck, having to submerge and leave men stranded on the surface, having to reach the bottom although that depth exceeds the builders' specifications. This one adds the liberation of chlorine gas from one of the batteries.I suppose it's understandable that these elements should run through just about every submarine movie ever made, up to and including World War II. How many dangers can an undersea vessel be subject to? I mean, nobody is going to parachute out of one of them. The crew can't be trapped in a trench behind enemy lines. Nobody is going to run about and clean out an enemy machine gun nest with a tommy gun and a grenade.Robert Young has a minor role as the nice guy who is left on the surface to die because the boat must dive under attack. Jimmy Durante is the cook who makes wisecracks and funny faces. Eugene Palette is along for the ride. Some scenes generate more tension than you might think -- when the boat is nose-deep in mud and the engine won't start -- and sometimes tragedy -- as when Sterling Holloway is stuck in a dogged-down compartment filling with chlorine and can't be let out.The plot isn't to be taken seriously. Montgomery, now a civilian, sneaks back aboard for the final mission and Captain Huston gruffly orders him to "take your post." What IS his post? And, when Montgomery merely hints at his honorable reasons for deserting Huston's daughter, Huston seems to grasp the entire situation as if by an avalanche of intuition.Small stuff though. It's an exciting movie for its time.

bkoganbing I recommend that movie viewers if in the New York City area go to the Intrepid museum and get some idea of how closed in and cramped the living was for the crews of World War II vintage submarines. How much more so that must have been for the seamen during World War I. It must have truly been hell below.Walter Huston and Robert Montgomery head the cast of Hell Below, Huston as the by the book captain and Montgomery as his free wheeling number two. They're both quite believable as Naval officers and the rest of the cast like Robert Young, Eugene Palette, Jimmy Durante, Madge Evans, Sterling Holloway, etc. fill their roles quite nicely.The silent service got more popular during World War II and after. It's amazing, but I could name a whole slew of submarine pictures like Torpedo Run, Operation Pacific, Hellcats of the Navy, Run Silent, Run Deep and many more and you'll see the same plot situations in all of them. I guess there truly is a limit on situations as well.Jimmy Durante's performance is interesting. He's pretty funny and his scene with the boxing kangaroo while on shore leave is very funny indeed. But I'd have to say a character like him in those cramped quarters is probably very necessary for morale. If you don't have someone like that to break the tension on board a submarine, you ought to get one transferred to your ship immediately.The highlight for me however is Sterling Holloway's death scene. Very similar to Sean McClory's in Island in the Sky. It will haunt you long after you've seen this film.

schappe1 This was part of a run of old war movies on TCM I caught recently. All of them, (the others were 'Captains of the Clouds' (1942) and 'Pilot #5', (1943)), had the same ending: the protagonist dies heroically on a suicide mission. The movies seemed fixated on the idea that heroes didn't just risk their lives: they sacrificed them. In 'Hell Below', perhaps the first of the great submarine dramas, there is an unnecessary heroic ending in which Robert Montgomery sacrifices his life to complete their mission while leaving the woman he loves to remain with her crippled husband.The story is really about the sort of decisions a commander has to make. Montgomery rebels against his captain, (Walter Huston), who has left a raft with several crewmen, including Montgomery's pal, (and look-alike), Robert Young, (it's the only film they both appeared in and they should have been playing brothers), to die in a hail of German machine gun bullets while the sub dives to avoid being fired upon themselves. Montgomery never forgives Huston. On a later patrol, Montgomery violates orders to maintain silence to start a battle Huston wanted to avoid. Sterling Holloway gets trapped in a section of the ship where poison gas is leaking and Montgomery has to seal him off or expose the rest of the crew to the gas. It's the equivalent of what Huston had to do and he realizes it, even if he doesn't immediately admit it. That's the real dramatic climax of the film, not the comic book suicide mission at the end. The film also features another trend of the times: the borscht belt comic relief provided by a noted comedian, in this case, Jimmy Durante. To the modern viewer this adds nothing to the film. In this case, there's also a glaring mistake in the editing. They apparently felt that the scene where Young and his men get machine gunned to death was a little strong so they sought to leaven it by following it with a clip from an earlier amusement park sequence in which Durante winds up boxing a kangaroo. This is the single most inappropriate and jarring segue in the history of the cinema. I suppose it's not quite right but I really wish someone would put it back where it belongs or delete it all together. One wonders why old Hollywood didn't trust the strength of the stories it was telling to entertain the audience.