Action in the North Atlantic (1943) on Netflix
Merchant Marine officers Steve Jarvis and Joe Rossi lose their tanker to a German U-boat in the North Atlantic. They sail the Liberty ship SS Seawitch in a convoy bound for Murmansk.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.0/105,065 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Captain Steve Jarvis commands the oil tanker SS Northern Star, with Joe Rossi as his first officer. A German submarine sinks the ship in the North Atlantic. Jarvis and Rossi escape in a lifeboat, and the U-boat rams and sinks that boat too. The men drift for eleven days on a wooden raft before rescue. On leave, Jarvis spends time with his wife Sarah, and Rossi weds the singer Pearl O'Neill. Back at the union hall, the Northern Star crew receives fresh orders: a Liberty ship named the Seawitch, again under Jarvis, with Rossi as his first officer. The Seawitch carries antiaircraft guns and a cannon worked by Navy gunners, and she sails in a convoy bound for the Soviet port of Murmansk. A wolfpack of U-boats attacks, and the convoy breaks apart.
Cast
- Frank Altenas German (uncredited)
Show all 20 cast
- Louis V. Arcoas Submarine Commander (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Action in the North Atlantic (1943)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Raymond Massey recalled in his autobiography that he and Humphrey Bogart, off duty and tipsy on martinis, bet on which of their stunt doubles was braver as the men dived off a burning ship, and then the two stars made the dive themselves.
- Director Lloyd Bacon's Warner Bros. contract expired mid-shoot, and when Jack L. Warner wanted to wait until the film was finished to discuss a new one, Bacon refused to continue without a contract; Warner fired him, brought in Byron Haskin and Raoul Walsh, and the filming ran 45 days over schedule.
- Edward G. Robinson and George Raft were the actors first cast as the two leads, but Robinson dropped out to make Destroyer at Columbia Pictures and was replaced by Raymond Massey, while Humphrey Bogart took over from Raft after Warner Bros. assigned Raft to Background to Danger.
- War restrictions kept the film off the sea: it was shot entirely on Warner Bros. sound stages and back lots, with ship sets built in halves on two stages, the tanker's burning and sinking staged on "Stage Nine", model German and Soviet aircraft mixed with real combat footage, and German officers' dialogue left unsubtitled.
- After the film opened, Humphrey Bogart lobbied unsuccessfully for a black Merchant Marine captain to appear in it, and was quoted saying that the color of a man's skin "should have nothing to do with his rights in a land built upon the self-evident fact that all men are created equal."
- Warner Bros. paid compensation to the journalist Helen Lawrenson after she alleged that some of the film's dialogue had been plagiarized from two of her magazine articles about the Merchant Marine.
- Humphrey Bogart's line "I'm just thinking about the trip back" was often cut out when Action in the North Atlantic was broadcast on American television in the decades after its release.
