The Bedford Incident (1965) on Netflix
Approved19651h 42mDramaThriller
The destroyer USS Bedford patrols the Denmark Strait under Captain Eric Finlander, who stalks a Soviet submarine in Greenland's waters. Journalist Ben Munceford comes aboard to interview him.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In 1963, the US Navy destroyer USS Bedford patrols the Denmark Strait, the water between Greenland and Iceland. Its captain, Eric Finlander, runs the ship strictly. A helicopter brings aboard Ben Munceford, a civilian photojournalist, and the new doctor, Lieutenant Commander Chester Potter. Commodore Wolfgang Schrepke, a German submarine commander in the last war now serving as a NATO adviser, is already on board. When the Bedford finds a Soviet submarine near Greenland, Finlander gives chase, and the boat takes cover under an ice shelf, where sonar contact is lost. A diesel submarine must surface within a day to run its engines and take in air, so Finlander waits it out. Potter warns that keeping the crew on constant high alert is dangerous, and Munceford presses the captain about his career and his public calls for more force.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- Frank Liebermanas Seaman 1st Class - Bridge
- James Caffreyas Seaman 1st Class - Bridge
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Bedford Incident (1965)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The novel was partly inspired by a real 1957 standoff in which the USS Gudgeon, commanded by Norman "Buzz" Bessac, was detected by Soviet forces off Vladivostok and dove 700 feet for a 30-hour hold-down before surfacing with torpedo tubes ready; a Morse code message identifying it as a US warship let it sail away unharmed.
- During the real 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet submarine B-59 was depth-charged by US destroyers unaware it carried a nuclear torpedo; its captain, cut off from Moscow for days, believed World War III had begun and wanted to launch it, but was overruled by flotilla commander Vasili Arkhipov, who insisted the sub surface instead.
- The Pentagon refused to lend the production any real US Navy vessels because it objected to how the film's screenplay portrayed the Navy, so the fictitious USS Bedford's exterior and interior shots were actually filmed aboard two British Type 15 frigates instead.
- Sidney Poitier was originally asked to play the ship's medical officer, but at his own request was cast instead as the civilian photojournalist Ben Munceford, making it the first role in his career in which his character's race is never mentioned.
