Gordon Douglas: Up Periscope, Santiago

I once started to write an article about director Gordon Douglas for a film magazine but was unable to get a handle on this protean director, equally adept at musicals (Young at Heart, 1954), science fiction (Them, 1954), Westerns (The Doolins of Oklahoma, 1949) and film noir (his two best films are I Was a Communist for the FBI, 1951, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, 1950).  Douglas was not an innovator and his personal style is elusive, but he was a solid professional who knew how to direct actors, where to place the camera, and how to effectively pace a story.  These virtues are all quite apparent in Up Periscope (1959) and Santiago (1956), both recently shown on Turner Classic Movies.

Santiago is an unusually anti-colonial film, with gun-runners Alan Ladd and Lloyd Nolan supplying weapons to the Cuban rebels, before the involvement of the United States in the rebellion.  Both are disgraced veterans of the Civil War, but Ladd is eventually converted to the cause by Rossana Podesta.  The use of color by veteran cinematographer John Seitz is superb, as it often was in classical films before color became the norm.  Up Periscope is a WW II submarine film very much influenced by Samuel Fuller's Hell and High Water, 1954,  a film that proved that the new widescreen process could be effective in the claustrophobic confines of a submarine.  The cinematographer, Carl Guthrie, and Douglas use low-angle shots to effectively convey how physically stifling a submarine can be, especially as it waits on the bottom, its air running out.
Both of these films use a variety of character actors interacting in a group setting; as these films were made close to the end of the classical era many of these actors soon drifted into television.  Santiago includes Royal Dano, Chill Wills and L.Q. Jones.  Up Periscope stars reliable veteran Edmond O'Brien and includes James Garner, Alan Hale, Jr., Edd Byrnes and Warren Oates.