Word: convoying
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H.M.S. King George V, fast, powerful, riding low in the water, plowed through the grey North Atlantic, her convoy of destroyers slipping along beside her. Five hundred miles off the coast the convoy was dropped; the battleship sailed on alone. At 6:16 on a grey, cold morning, ship watchers at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay reported tersely: ''British warship, King George V class, off Norfolk waters."* Through a morning mist the battleship swung northwest, past the mouth of the Potomac, the inlets of Maryland's Eastern Shore, to drop anchor, invisible in the rain...
Late in the week, Berlin announced that dive bombers had come upon a British convoy west of Crete, and in the ensuing attack had scored "severe bomb hits of heavy and medium caliber" on the stern of one battleship, forward and starboard on another battleship, and also on a heavy cruiser...
There is just enough story to keep the picture, the best of the British war films to date, from being a straight documentary. A cruiser is sent to convoy a fleet of merchant vessels from a European port (presumably Norway) to England. The problem is complicated cinematically because 1) the convoying cruiser's Lieut. Cranford (John Clements) is supposed to have run away with, then deserted the wife of Cruiser Captain Armitage (Clive Brook); 2) crusty old Captain Eckersley (Edward Chapman) of the tramp steamer Seaflower prefers to go it alone, keeps dropping out of the convoy, unconsciously betraying...
...rest, the bigger & better part of Convoy, is the sea, and the deadly hide-and-seek of men and ships on it. Producer Michael Balcon and Director Pen Tennyson have given the picture a realism that makes even The Long Voyage Home look like a studio piece. This realism of the sea is shot through with the realism of sea war. Terror is in the form of ships, the shapes of guns and conning towers. It is in the fog which hides the pursued, but also hides the pursuer. It is under the dark, heaving water; and even...
...terror alone could not make Convoy a great war picture. What makes it great is the picture's climax. The seamen stand grimly watching Captain Armitage pace the deck, trying to decide whether to take on the pocket battleship Deutschland with his outclassed cruiser. Battle means almost certain destruction. Suddenly the Captain says he has decided to fight. The men stop gnawing their lips, break into grins...