Das Boot

I was a German school kid when this submarine thriller first came out, and at the time, we spent a lot of time yelling "Vorne 10, Hinten 5," "Anblasen!" and "Das muss das Boot abkönnen" at each other. The fact that I still use these catchphrases to crack up some of my old cronies speaks volumes about the impact it had on our malleable minds.

Based on the autobiographical novel by Lothar-Gunter Buchheim, Das Boot follows the Atlantic voyage of U-96 during World War II. Unlike the spacious nuclear powered vessel in Hunt for Red October, these WWII submarines are submerged coffins, tiny mechanical tubes that will drive anybody claustrophobic. It's a staple of anti-war movies that all heroics disappear quickly in the face of the cruelty of war, but there is no other movie of this kind where pretense and patriotism are so thoroughly undermined from the very start. About a minute into the film, we see soldiers piss on their captain's car, and a few minutes later, they're throwing up violently -- these guys start out as drunken louts and deteriorate from there.

Then there's the characters -- Jurgen Prochnow, mostly known to Americans as terrorist villian in this or that blockbuster, plays the jaded Captain, and Herbert Groenemeyer, who went on to become a major German rock star, is the on-board journalist. Everybody else onboard becomes familiar as their beards grow, and by the end of the movie you feel like you can almost distinguish them by their bodily odors. The bitter ironies of their struggle stay with you after the last "ping" from the destroyer's chugging by overhead has subsided.

What happens underwater is nothing short of thrilling. Wolfang Peterson, who burst on the international scene with this film, is now a sought-after Hollywood director, giving us In The Line of Fire and last summer's The Perfect Storm. In Das Boot, he manages to make the horror of being locked up for months at a time in a metal tube of questionable quality while enemy destroyers drop depth charges on you much more real than you'd like.

Originally, this film was also released as a TV mini-series on German TV. The latest Director's Cut release adds material that was omitted from the first theatrical release and brings the movie to a whooping 3 1/2 hours. With all due respect, to my mind, this is stretching it. Unless you're a hard-core fan, you might do better with the shorter version. If you watch the long cut, make sure to plan two or even three nights for watching it (we made our own mini-series out of it). The atmosphere is so claustrophobic, the terror so suffocating, that watching this in one sitting might actually be determental to your health.

Das Boot(1981)

Running Length: 3:30
MPAA Classification: R (Profanity, mature themes)
Cast: Jurgen Prochnow, Herbert Gronemeyer, Klaus Wennemann, Hubertus Bengsch, Martin Semmelrogge, Bernd Tauber, Erwin Leder, Martin May
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Screenplay: Wolfgang Petersen based on the novel by Lothar-G. Buchheim
Cinematography: Jost Vacano
Music: Klaus Doldinger
U.S. Distributor: Columbia Pictures