Word: graf
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pursuit of the Graf Spee (Powell and Pressburger; Rank) is a good sea story, not very well told; but there are moments when it holds, like a sea shell, the soundIng memory of the waves Britannia used to rule...
...just after World War II began, three cruisers of the Royal Navy (Ajax, Achilles, Exeter) sighted a dangerous German raider, the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, off the coast of Uruguay, and attacked. They had their nerve. The German was one of the most formidable ships afloat-a fact soon demonstrated. In little more than an hour the Exeter was wallowing out of action. But the other two cruisers, harrying the enemy like sharks at a whale, managed to hit where it hurt. The German commander (Peter Finch) withdrew into the River Plate, and docked at Montevideo. Prodded...
Accompanying The Pursuit of the Graf Spee at the Keith Memorial is a foolish bit of movie-making called The Unknown Terror. This terror turns out to be a supposedly virulent fungus that threatens to inundate the world. But since the terror looks like nothing so much as a mass of soapsuds, it surely deserves some sort of award for the sickliest monster of the year...
...incident marks one of the few victories for the English during the dismal opening months of the war, and it makes an exciting story. Unfortunately, the new English film which describes the death of the Graf Spee fritters away most of the excitement. It is an unfocused, chaotic motion picture which makes clear only that the German ship sank...
Just like any other movie, a war picture must, if it is to be dramatically effective, tell the story of men, not just of ships. The obvious figure around which The Pursuit of the Graf Spee should have been built is that of Captain Langsdorff, whom Churchill himself described as "a high-class person." But the screen play of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger scarcely shows what happens on the German warship during the fateful engagement, and does not mention the captain's suicide at all. A potentially tragic figure thus never becomes even really interesting...