646f9e108c During WW2, two Navy officers take command of an obsolete, World War I-vintage, destroyer that is assigned to convoy-escort duty in the Japanese-controlled waters of the South Pacific. U. S. Navy Lieutenant Gregg Masterman (<a href=">Robert Taylor), of THE Harvard and Boston Back Bay Mastermans, learned about the sea while winning silver cups sailing his yacht. He climbs swiftly in rank, and is now Junior Aide to Rear Admiral Stephen Thomas (<a href=">Charles Laughton). In contrast,Lieutenant Commander Martin J. Roberts (<a href=">Brian Donlevy), enlisted in World War I, and worked his way up gradually. He retired in 1935 but has been recalled as Executive Officer of the destroyer "Cranshaw." Impressed by Roberts' vigor, the rear admiral raises him to command of the destroyer "Warren,", an over-age World War I ship that has been recommissioned. Master laughs at Roberts' new command, only to have the Admiral assign him as the Executive Officer of the "Warren," under Roberts. The ship is to join a convoy which has already left Hawaii, bound for the United States. The Flagship of the convoy is the cruiser, "Chattanooga,' with Admiral Thomas in command. On the way, a lifeboat is sighted. From it are picked up two old sailors, two women and twenty babies. Their boat had been sunk while evacuating them from Hawaii. Roberts puts Masterman in charge of the infants. The destroyer reaches the convoy. That night, the Japanese attack the convoy, the "Chattanooga" is hit, and the enemy then turns its attention to the "Warren." The movie is divided into three parts, like Gaul. Part I: Character. Charles Laughton as the crusty old admiral (is there any other kind?) longs to get back to sea and join the war in 1943. Laughton has an efficient but cocky and somewhat spoiled aide in Robert Taylor – a Harvard man. Brian Donleavy is a former enlisted man who has worked his way up to Lieutenant Commander and Laughton makes him skipper of a refurbished old destroyer, the USS Warren left over from WWI. Figuring that his aide needs a bit of seasoning to make a good officer, Laughton assigns him to the Warren as Executive Officer. Taylor makes a decent exec but misses no opportunity to twit the captain.<br/><br/>Part II: "Comedy." There is no romantic interest for Taylor, so the film introduces sentiment and comedy by having the Warren pick up a lifeboat filled with two women and a dozen babies. The crew goes nuts over the presence of the women and babies, especially when it turns out that BOTH of the women are pregnant and must give birth in sequence.<br/><br/>Part III: Action. Because of Taylor's having made a mistake in judgment, the Warren shows up an hour late before taking its position as part of the destroyer screen for a convoy. A Japanese battleship shows up and wounds the convoy's flagship. Donleavy decides on a courageous and almost certainly suicidal manouever to save the convoy, but he is knocked unconscious before he finishes. Taylor takes over command, zips the Warren back and forth through its own smoke screen, and blows the battleship (a "pagoda-masted buzzard") out of the water.<br/><br/>I wish I could say I liked it because I'm ordinarily attracted to these inexpensive and propagandistic movies made during the war, some of them well executed within their limitations. This isn't one of them. It's easy going enough, no more intense than a war-time comic book, but it's too long to hold one's interest.<br/><br/>The comedy episode is really really dated. Maybe we've seen too many movies in which women (with or without kids) are reluctantly taken aboard a warship – "Operation Pacific", "Operation Petticoat," "Hell or High Water," and the couldn't-be-better-titled "The Baby and the Battleship." Whatever the reason, my heart sank when the lifeboat full of babies showed up because I knew what was coming. What I didn't know is that it would take so agonizingly long to get through it. The officers' eyes pop. The men assigned to care for the babies are plug uglies. And then the deliveries of the new babies. Eyes pop again. "She can't have a baby – that's against regulations!" The pharmacist's mate is scared to death. Everybody is scared to death. The crew paces back and forth, smoking nervously, while the baby is delivered. ("A boy?") Then the second lady comes to term and we go through the whole routine once more. It's like being on the Long Island Expressway on a Sunday night, with the cars rolling along at ten or sometimes five miles an hour, sometimes stopping completely.<br/><br/>I won't go on. It's not a hateful movie. I just wish it had been better so that I could recommend watching it but my muse is screaming in my ear. "Stand By For Action" has a little bit of everything: tennis, babies, head injuries, sea battles, propaganda, multiple births, and Charles Laughton milking every scene like only he could do. The film tries so hard to squeeze in so much that I was expecting Brian Donlevy to give Robert Taylor advice on how to keep his mustache properly trimmed, as well as the wisdom he gives him on commanding a ship. "Stand By For Action" is unfocused and this is why it feels like it drifts to a climax rather than steams ahead. However unrealistic the final battle scene might be, I did find myself caught up in it. It maybe helped that they had Laughton act as narrator to make some sense of what the Warren was up to.
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