Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

ThiefHott Too much of everything

BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

edwagreen Glenn Ford and Ernest Borgnine do well in this 1958 drama, but the writing is limited.Ford has an ultimate personal decision to make. We have seen in the tradition of 1982's "Sophie's Choice." I'm talking about the power of life and death here.The crew is limited here with their usual talk about the opposite sex.Borgnine, as Ford's best friend and assistant, is most supportive here which is heart rendering.Philip Ober is appealing as an understanding general. The brief use of flashbacks here is effective as Ford knew what was coming and wanted his wife to flee with their baby daughter.

Robert J. Maxwell This is a reasonably well-done tale of a submarine commanded by Glenn Ford, with Ernest Borgnine as his friend and executive officer, during World War II.Ford and Borgnine are called back from the Philippines to Pearl Harbor, leaving Ford's wife and little girl behind. By the time Ford and Borgnine take their boat out, the family has been captured. Ford pursues the big Japanese aircraft carrier, the Shinaru, but it's being deliberately shielded by a transport carrying a thousand captives of the Japanese. The captives include Ford's own family, and he knows it, but he's forced -- against the urgent pleas of Borgnine -- to take a shot at the Shinaru. He misses and sinks the transport instead.This leaves him understandably bitter. He takes his boat directly into Tokyo Bay and takes another shot at the Shinaru. This time his torpedoes are intercepted purposefully by a Japanese destroyer. After this dangerous venture he is barely able to get his boat back to Pearl Harbor, passing out in a tormented sleep for three days.A final attempt at the carrier leads him to Kiska in the Aleutian Islands, which Ford considers a dead end. As well he should. This is late 1942. The Battle of Midway was over. The Japanese still held some territory in the Aleutians but it was practically uncontested. Nobody wanted the Aleutians. There's nothing there but sea lions and bird, and the weather is lousy. There were some bloody encounters in the fog and snow but in the end the Japanese withdrew, perhaps out of boredom.The unlikely prospect of finding a big Japanese carrier there aside, this is pretty well done. It's unsparing in some ways. There are a few flashbacks to the happy times that Ford, his family, and Borgnine spent together, but in the end the wife and little blond girl die. A more traditional ending would have reunited them somehow.The visual effects are effective too. And there is a good deal of tension in the scene in Tokyo Harbor, when Ford is negotiating a mine field. After the final attack on the Shinaru, the submarine is sunk. The majority of the crew escape using aqua lungs and are rescued by a companion boat, but six men are left behind to die. When he's pulled aboard the rescue boat, one of the first things Ford asks is the names of the men who didn't make it -- an admirable touch.Borgnine is a little more humanistic than the skipper. This is a traditional conflict: the sympathetic second-in-command and the stern and by-the-book skipper. At that, Glenn Ford is not just tough, he's almost miraculously indifferent to pain. When they are depth-charged, Ford falls and breaks the bone in his upper arm. The pharmacist's mate puts a small splint over the fracture and Ford carries on -- giving orders, donning his escape gear, floating to the surface -- as if nothing were wrong. I remember meeting a stranger as he emerged, loaded, from a bar and managed to fall down while trying to get into his car. "I think I broke my fibia," he said thickly. And indeed I could feel the grinding of a fractured bone in his shin. By the time the ambulance arrived, it could no longer be said that he was feeling no pain.As a submarine movie, this is no masterpiece but it's above average. Ford is in his minimalist mode, not animated by hatred as in "The Big Heat," but the interpretation is believable enough. There are times when Borgnine seems to be reading his lines from cue cards but he's such a jolly, good-natured guy that it's difficult not to like him. And this is one of the few instances from this period when the inclusion of the hero's romantic interest is justified. Without the corny scenes of his wife an family, we wouldn't be able to understand Ford's character.

vandino1 These submarine films always follow the pattern of playing out the relationship of the determined Captain and the watchful, suspicious second in command. This one features Ford as the Captain and Borgnine as the Lieutenant. Same old routine. The film starts fine then gradually becomes absurd as feverish Ford turns into Captain Ahab relentlessly in search of his white whale---in this case the Japanese carrier Shinaru. Seems the Navy is perfectly willing to accommodate Ford on his obsessive mission, and Borgnine is even willing to reject the offer of a command of his own vessel in order to stick by Ahab-Ford's side. Oh, sure. And what started all this? In an earlier scene, Ford is "forced" to torpedo a transport filled with 1400 civilians, including Ford's wife and child (caught in Manila) that is being used as a screen to protect the Shinaru. Absurd! Both the Navy and Ford's character, fully aware the transport is there, would never take that kind of chance. The potentially staggering loss would have been a calamity that would never have been sanctioned. This is just a ridiculous contrivance to fuel Ford's obsession. In addition, the filmmakers try to have it both ways by never stating whether or not Ford's family survives or not. Borgnine is merely there as the Voice of Reason. His only other duty seems to be offering Ford coffee in every other scene.Otherwise, this film is a second-rate action film. The supporting actors have almost nothing to work with, leaving them blanks we could care less about. Interesting to see a young Al Freeman, Jr. on board, since there were few black submariners in the service. So, not historically inaccurate. The stock footage of U.S. destroyers used to play Japanese destroyers IS inaccurate, obviously. And the special effects are variable; effective at times and painfully obvious at others. And the multi-depth charge walloping Ford's sub takes is very impressive, but also hard to believe that the sub isn't blown to pieces considering most of the charges explode right on top of it. One other odd note is the lack of a music score credit. The score is perfectly fine yet whoever provided it was either denied credit or took their name off it. Wonder why.

nabor7 Having served in submarines for six years, and having seen every submarine movie possible, TORPEDO RUN is the most realistic movie yet. The submarine interior including the conning tower brought back a lot of memories. The crew terminology and actions were true to form. The gliches were few but only a submarine historian or WWII veteran would pick up on most of them. The opening scene of the ship in the periscope is not the same ship shown a few seconds later in actual footage being sunk. Also in 1942-1943 torpedo reliability was low and very seldom would only one be fired. I doubt that if a Captain would have known there were prisoners aboard a transport would the chance be taken as Barney Doyle took. At least one transport was really sunk carrying prisoners, but it was not marked as such and it was proceeding as a normal transport. All in all this is my favorite sub movie and I enjoyed every minute if it. Some seem to think it drags on and the story line is to simplistic. That's how it was. A sub's duty was to sink enemy shipping and there would be days of boredom followed by hours of gut wrenching tension amid depth charging, and constantly being chased under by aircraft. I highly recommend TORPEDO RUN.