Edgar Allan Pooh . . . actor John Wayne as "Duke" commands his ex-wife while appropriating a random, unrelated orphan newborn from the local hospital to close OPERATION PACIFIC. So while this ready-made Daddy is busy bringing down enemy destroyers, planes, subs, tankers, and aircraft carriers, Junior can look forward to about six days annually with dear old Pops. Speaking of "Pop," goes the weasel, if you can suffer a spoiler about OP's Captain Ahab moment. And talk about product DIS-placement. Near the middle of this flick, producer Warner Bros. asserts that their 1942 Jack Benny film titled GEORGE WASHINGTON SLEPT HERE is so boring that it will doom any submarine below the surface of the seas on the weekly movie night. It's a wonder that OP's lead actress Patricia Neal didn't wind up with Prince Albert in a can by the end of 1951. First she got Michael Rennie from a saucer during THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, and then "the Duke" from a sardine tin here. Klaatu Barada Nikto, anyone?

J. Spurlin Duke E. Gifford (John Wayne) is second in command of the USS Thunderfish, a submarine which is firing off torpedoes that either explode too early or never explode at all. It's a dilemma that he'll eventually take up personally. Even more personal is his quest to win back his ex-wife (Patricia Neal), a nurse; but he'll have to win her back from a navy flier who also happens to be his commander's little brother.We know this movie is going to be an eye-roller during the opening scene in which the Thunderfish is transporting two nuns, a baby and a group of orphans who go running past a ludicrously tolerant crew as they're trying to sink a Japanese ship. While the action scenes are good, nearly every human moment in this film is phony; and the few that aren't are thanks to the usual expert performance from Patricia Neal, not from writer-director George Waggner.The special effects and production values in this submarine drama are okay, but occasionally we'll see a cable pulling a torpedo or a night-time sky that has a ceiling and a corner. Max Steiner's score underlines every banality in the script and then underlines it twice more. At one point a crew member laughs at the Hollywood hokum in the Cary Grant film, "Destination Tokyo." If only he could have been out in the audience for his own picture.

bkoganbing I like submarine films, but in watching them one has to realize that there are only so many plot situations and each film seems to cover just about all of them. In fact the officers and men of the U.S.S. Thunderfish during what little spare time they had were watching another Warner Brother submarine adventure, Destination Tokyo. If you remember they exchanged the film with another submarine crew for George Washington Slept Here.Operation Pacific unfortunately suffered with an additional handicap, not foreseen by the Brothers Warner. Another film from Paramount entitled Submarine Command came out right about the same time as Operation Pacific. It starred John Wayne's very good friend and box office rival William Holden. A lot of the same situations are covered in that film, hard to distinguish between the two.That being said Operation Pacific is one of John Wayne's better war films and a good tribute to the men of the Silent Service. I remember back in the day, I had a history professor in college who was a marine in World War II. He said without reservation that for all of what he was doing in places like Tarawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, the tipping balance in the Pacific War was the American superiority in submarines. Due in no small part to the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet Chester W. Nimitz who trained on submarines and appreciated their worth. Cutting supplies to the home islands helped in no small measure to American combat success ultimately.John Wayne is the Executive Officer of the Thunderfish which is commanded by Ward Bond. His former wife Patricia Neal is a navy nurse at Pearl Harbor. He'd like to win her back, but she's now dating Philip Carey, a navy flier and Bond's younger brother.Besides the romantic problems the Thunderfish goes on all kinds of missions. We first see them rescuing some orphan children off a Japanese held island, later they have some real problems with defective torpedoes in which Chief Jack Pennick has a big hand in solving. And of course the usual tangles with the Japanese Navy exploding depth charges around them.In the supporting cast I have to say that my two favorite performances are from Paul Picerni who plays crewman Jonesy. Picerni's best known for being Robert Stack's number 2 guy in The Untouchables, but he's absolutely great as the comic relief in Operation Pacific. Happy-go-lucky sort of guy, if he were Latino, Gilbert Roland would have had the part.The second is Jack Pennick. You can't think of too many John Ford films his horseface presence wasn't in. He plays the Chief Petty Officer on the Thunderfish and he's simply known as the Chief. Ford usually gave him minimal dialog in his films, he speaks a bit more here. One of my favorite John Wayne moments in cinema is when Wayne speaks a heartfelt tribute to young ensign Martin Milner after Pennick has been killed. Talking about the accomplishments that people of his rank make to the U.S. Navy. If your eyes don't moisten you are made of stone. It is in fact one of my favorite John Wayne scenes of all time.Though the Duke and Patricia Neal got a lot more attention fourteen years later in In Harm's Way, I think they do just fine in Operation Pacific and I think you'll feel the same way when you see it.

rbverhoef A John Wayne film should be a western directed by John Ford or Howard Hawks, otherwise it should not even be made. 'Operation Pacific' is one of the examples of what you get when it does star John Wayne, but it is not a western and definitely not directed by one of the two great directors I named above. This is a clichéd film, and since it is about a submarine in WW-II it contains even more clichés since a story set in that time and place can only go in a few directions.John Wayne is Duke Gifford, an officer and hero on submarine Thunderfish. The film starts with the rescue of a couple of babies and two nuns. Once they are on board of the submarine I started laughing. While under attack the children are running around and no one gets mad. I thought of the greatest of submarine-films, 'Das Boot', and what would have happened there. After this we get to meet Mary Stuart (Patricia Neal), the love interest on shore. Then we go back to the submarine and we get some more of the usual stuff.Most things are really close to annoying in this film. Especially the patriotism and heroic acts are things you expect, but you hope that they never come. Maybe I should not compare a film like this with 'Das Boot' but they could have a done a lot better at least by trying to get things a little right. The scenes on shore are not much better. There is another man in the life of Mary Stuart but we all know how that story ends. Another scene gets the men of the Thunderfish in trouble with the military police. The way John Wayne saves them from that situation is pretty close to stupid.I have to say one positive thing. The film looks pretty good, considering the time it was made. Maybe the combat scenes are clichéd and predictable, on a technical level they succeed. Whether they are possible the way we see them is another question. (The images are almost saying you can't lose a war as long as you have a submarine.) Still, in the end this is nothing more than a typical bad John Wayne film.