Sub Titles

MOST OF THE people in line at the Sack Beacon Hill asked for tickets to Das Boot Pronouncing it like what cowboys wear, probably ready to see another complex, harshly intellectual film, as they have come to expect from recent German filmmakers. Once in the dark, however, they discovered that Boot not only means "boat," but is pronounced just like the English word; and, moreover, that this is a good old-fashioned action-packed American-style war movie. Complete with a tough, taciturn captain, young bloom-of-manhood sailors just doing their duty, suspense, explosions, and the general message that war is hell, Das Boot has everything one expects from a World War II film--except the conviction that these noble men were sacrificing their lives for the right side.

Cast in the "American" style, but darkened by German guilt feelings about the country's recent past, the film becomes a kind of German Vietnam movie. But unlike Fasbinder (in The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lili Marleen), Schloendorff (in The Tin Drum), and Syberberg (in Our Hitler), director Wolfgang Petersen avoids discussing the complexities of the political, psychological, and cultural roots of the "German catastrophe" and presents, instead, a soldier's-eye view of the war. These boys do not see the battle as the culmination of Romanticism and Wagner or as the result of contradictions of the petty bourgeois character, but rather as a simple, choice-less exposure to death. They believe in their captain, not in Hitler.

Das Boot is one of the highest-grossing films in German history. It provides the audience with its favorite (American) kind of entertainment, while soothing consciences about any collective guilt. These men are good; They are soldiers, not Nazis, Mostly they are dark-haired, Southern-spoken. Only one "overgrows Hitlerjugend," as the captain calls him, shows a tendency toward uniform-worship and blond Aryan arrogance. The tall, chisel-cheeked heroes of Leni Riefenstahl could never fit in the low ceilings and grime of a submarine.

Outstanding camerawork creates a stifling sense of the claustrophobic tube which we share for more than two hours (and two months) with the sailors and their almost smell able dirty socks, As the camera shoots through the single corridor with amazing agility during an alarm, everyone in the audience cringes in fear of bumping his head. The memory of the swaying, dancing point of view presented in the opening scene's smoky, sexy cabaret makes the small interior space of that bar seem a veritable Astrodome.

Petersen's success in drawing the viewer into the characters' physical setting creates a sense of empathy for their mental anguish even if they are somewhat caricatured. The heroically low-keyed captain (Jurgen Prochnow) combines the steely bright blue eyes of an American astronaut with the scruffy beard and weathered skin of an old salt and leads a crew including an ever-dependable lieutenant, a neophyte war correspondent and more than one boy in love.

The one character who adds a distinctly Germanic touch to the story is the engineer Johann, whose red-rimmed eyes, hollow-cheeked beared and skewed teeth suggest a gnome straight out of Grimm's ghastly tales. Nicknamed "The Phantom," he crouches like a magicker among his intricate pumping machinery and shivers with foreboding before each explosion of an underwater bomb. But he is not the only hint of a tradition of fantasy. At one point we awake with the correspondent not knowing whether the terrifying crises of the past hours were real or only a dream. We share an unsettling feeling about the bizarre nature of submarine life: It is both heimlich (homey, cozy, enclosed) and disturbingly unheimlich (uncanny, strange, spooky).

Of course, the implications of being shut up in a simultaneously phallic and womb like ship, looking wistfully at snapshots of the mountainous fatherland while sinking helplessly deeper and deeper under the sea are there for those who want to explore them. But Petersen concentrates on the nitty gritty of maintaining a ship through attack after attack; his pacing maintains excitement without fail. The same limits of space that enhance the scenes of suspense, where we must suffer with the crew, listening to the watery ping of sonar gingerly feeling out the submarine before it is slammed by bombs, might have constrained the more violently active scenes. Petersen, however, maintains a remarkable degree of motion in such a confined space.

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM for an American audience is losing part of the impact of this almost entirely visual film in order to read dialogue like "Contact bearing 22.37 degree--sinking fast!" "Full speed ahead at 30' 2" !" and "Aye, aye, captain!" Watching the movie is like reading a super-action-heroes comic book. Moreover, sailor's slang, no matter how well translated, is meant to be heard and not read: "Screw till it falls off, you swine!" For once it seems a film might be better dubbed than subtitled, expect that the sound of the German language is an essential part of the effect of this film on American viewers.

The audience for this movie, moreover, is not entirely accustomed to watching subtitled films--this is being shown at a Sack Theater, not at the Orson Welles. Das Boot is being promoted as a movie that happens to come from Germany, not as a "foreign film," with all the connotations of all-art-and-no-plot that the term carries for American. If the same audiences who like action-packed movies are willing to read subtitles and be depressed, Das Boot will be a hit in America, too.