I Watch Films: Operation Petticoat

 

Operation Petticoat

It’s 1959 (the year the film was made) and Admiral Matt Sherman (Cary Grant) comes aboard the submarine USS Sea Tiger, due to be scrapped. He finds his logs from 1941, when he was the captain* and reminisces about his war time exploits.

Stationed in the Philippines in December 1941 the Sea Tiger is bombed and strafed while in dock. Facing imminent invasion he convinces his commander to let him repair and refloat it so he can sail to Darwin, Australia, a voyage of 2000 miles, rather than destroy it in place to prevent it being captured. With everything in chaos and the stores unresponsive, he’s assigned a replacement officer, Nick Holden (Tony Curtis). Holden, an Admiral’s aide sent ahead to prepare things for the Admiral who is now not coming, has been left stranded. Sherman thinks him useless – his greatest achievement being winning the fleet Rumba competition with the Admiral’s wife – but Holden gets himself appointed supply officer. Using of scams, deals and outright theft he gets what’s needed.

They manage to get just about seaworthy before the base is evacuated**. Out at sea and cut off Sherman sends a party led by Holden ashore at a nearby island; he finds five female American nurses who were stranded after the plane they were on left them there. The presence of these young, attractive women in the close quarters of an all-male crewed submarine causes a major source of tension, and most of the jokes for the rest of the film. Lieutenant Duran, who is both busty (see many scenes of men passing her in cramped submarine corridors) and accident-prone keeps causing chaos for the captain. This culminates when they stumble upon a Japanese oil tanker and are lining up a torpedo shot, only for her to accidentally fire early so it goes up the beach and destroys a truck.

Arriving at another base, further south in the Philippines, the Colonel says that they don’t have anything to spare, it’s all gone up into the hills in preparation for resisting the Japanese from there. They can’t even evacuate the nurses, all the ships and planes are gone. Holden goes into action, setting up a casino where troops can get chips in return for the equipment they need. He also gets into trouble trying to court Lieutenant Duran; Sherman catches him with her in his cabin and also with champagne (no booze on board ship, he makes him pour it away). Holden explains that he’s engaged to a railroad heiress; having been brought up poor he joined the Navy and made himself useful to the Admiral until he met rich people. Duran eventually finds out about this and feels betrayed.

To repaint the Sea Tiger they try to track down red lead undercoat, but there’s not enough so they mix it with white, to end up with pink. Then they take three hours to celebrate New Year with a feast on the deck before painting it grey. Obviously the New Year feast is interrupted by a Japanese attack and they have to set sail still painted pink. Tokyo Rose, the Japanese propaganda radio presenter mocks them for it. Unfortunately they don’t have a working transmitter so an American destroyer that spots them thinks it’s a Japanese trick. Can they survive the US Navy?

This manages to maintain it’s comedy, despite it’s age. The clash between Holden, part of the shoreside establishment who is in the Navy for his own benefit, and Sherman, a sea-going captain who wants to get his sunken, damaged boat back in the war is one of the strongest bits. And another is that there’s a regular, serious war film going on that the comedy is taking part in. That every one of the nurses matches up with one of the crew is a little convenient, and a girdle being used to fix a machine or a bra being a key part of the finale is probably not as entertaining as it was in 1959. Perhaps worst of all is Holden’s contribution to the New Year’s feast; scavenging military supplies to get the Sea Tiger into the war is one thing, straight up robbing a farmer something else.

Watch This: Entertaining war time comedy with two great leads
Don’t Watch This: Just a lot of jokes about women and being in the Navy

 

* His rank, of course, was Lieutenant Commander.

** Holden gets a witch doctor “down from the hills” to bless the Sea Tiger, reasoning they need all the luck they can get. I note that this would have been difficult in the Philippines, a majority Roman Catholic country; why not get a local priest, an American minister of some sort, or indeed a naval or army chaplain? The answer, of course, is that they are out in the Pacific, this is exotic and mysterious. The one Filipino member of the crew, Sergeant Ramon Gillardo, Holden’s sidekick who escaped from a prison when it was bombed, is played by Clarence Lung, a Chinese-American.