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Away All Boats (DVD)
Year: 1956
Rating: M
Director: Joseph Pevney
Cast: Lex Barker, Jeff Chandler, George Nader
Release Date: February 02, 2011
Distributor: Beyond
The Film: 2.5
FILMINK rates DVDs and Blu-rays out of 5“...the style is meat and potatoes...”
Away All Boats is a well-produced mid-‘50s WWII action movie that features the ideological pre-occupations of that decade's cinema culture. Made just before the Cold War started to really heat up, the movie, like so many a ‘50s melodrama is not so much a film about winning, but about finding out what kind of leadership works best (that is for America and therefore the world!). In classic war movie fashion its moral is worked out in a theatre of courage and sacrifice.
The plot involves the hard-arsed Captain Hawks, played by the cadaverous and ghoulish looking Jeff Chandler, and his efforts to bring a crew of untested men into line. Set in the Pacific, the ship is an attack transport, a sitting target for kamikaze pilots. This is a lot better than it sounds; the style is meat and potatoes and the plentiful action combines location/studio re-creations with what looks like actual colour newsreels from WWII.
George Nader plays the ‘moderate' junior officer, an experienced merchant marine captain, freshly recruited to the US Navy, a mild mannered guy, a natural leader who acts as a go-between for Hawks and a suspicious crew.
