Greyhound
starring Tom Hanks, Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan and Elisabeth Shue
screenplay by Tom Hanks
directed by Aaron Schneider
Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦
This is a good movie. I watched it four times over a couple of days. Based on the novel The Good Shepherd by C.S. Forester (1955, Little, Brown), Greyhound, set in February 1942, features an American Fletcher class fast attack destroyer escorting Convoy HX-25 of 37 merchant supply ships across the North Atlantic to Liverpool, England. It’s the height of Nazi U-Boat wolf pack submarine warfare in the Battle of the Atlantic. I was attracted to it because it stars Tom Hanks, and because it’s a wartime Atlantic convoy story. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada was a staging port for wartime convoys in both World War I and World War II, and I just happened to have visited there last year. Greyhound makes no mention of the North American origin of the convoy, however. Instead, the film starts as the ships are about to exceed ground-based air cover and enter the most dangerous, mid-ocean waters, nicknamed “The Pit.” In addition to my interest grounded in my visit to Halifax, NS is my familiarity with the British Tribal class of WWII destroyers, which were approximately the same size and capacity as the Fletcher class, although with slightly less powerful engine turbines. There is a famous Tribal class destroyer, the HMCS Haida, docked in Hamilton, Ontario as a museum ship that I have visited more than once in my life.
The North Atlantic in February is a vicious place. Rough seas, freezing ocean spray. If a sailor falls overboard, or if a ship is torpedoed and sinks with survivors in the water, the water is so cold that these men will freeze to death before a ship can turn around and send out a rescue dinghy. When the Greyhound detects U-Boats, she speeds off thorough the violent seas with surprising agility to challenge the enemy. Only four warships are escorting the convoy: Greyhound as leader, two British destroyers, Harry and Eagle, and a Canadian corvette, the Dicky. Corvettes were an early wartime anti-submarine mainstay of the Canadian navy. They were small warships that packed a big punch.
There follows about 72-hours of hair-raising marine combat until the convoy reaches land-based air cover on the other side. I was particularly fascinated by the Greyhound as a machine. Moving parts and men following naval protocols working in synchronicity. It was terribly interesting to imagine that this was a very realistic dramatization of a Second World War ship in battle. (I think I am attracted to the 2010 Tony Scott movie Unstoppable starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pine for similar reasons. My male psychology is attracted to the locomotive as a big, phallic machine.)
Other great WWII submarine movies I have watched and enjoyed include: The Enemy Below (1957, starring Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens, directed by Dick Powell, based on the 1956 novel by Denys Rayner); and, Run Silent, Run Deep (1958, starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster, directed by Robert Wise, based on the 1955 novel by Commander Edward L. Beach, Jr.)
Much of Greyhound was shot aboard the USS Kidd, a retired WWII veteran Fletcher class destroyer that today is a museum ship berthed in the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The script mentions the Kidd by name, as an homage.