Once on Blu-ray - David Hare enthuses over HELL AND HIGH WATER (Samuel Fuller, USA, 1954)*

Fuller favorite RIchard Widmark (above,Adam) rubs his cheek against the periscope like a kitten while the wonderful, too seldom seen Bella Darvi (below, Denise) sorts out the fleshy and greasy all male submarine crew with a charm school lesson in gender politics that has them licking it up in Fuller's completely mad apocalyptic and wonderful Cold War Chinese Commie Camp masterpiece Hell and High Water from 1954.

I first saw this and fell in love with it in the 60s back in the KIngs Cross Gaiety Theatre days where a knockout Tech IB print of it used to often play there. Fuller was the perfect director for those totally honest audiences, completely non bourgeois or worse, and no pretentious arthouse crowd. The Gaiety people also loved visceral, operatic directors like VIsconti, at least for his high period up to and including Sandra/Vaghe Stelle dell'Orsa from 1965. These were two seemingly different artists that genuinely moved the Gaiety crowd physically and emotionally, and which allowed us to relate to the screen, often verbally with shouting, cheering, booing and general concurrence. 

Cinema going has never been as engaging for me and is best avoided if I can, until perhaps the fabulous full house for Lube's Trouble in Paradise earlier this year (2017) in Bologna in which a substantially first time young audience to the picture again lapped it up like kittens with cream and gave the movie thunderous applause for minutes at the end with the final credits.

And that's how Fuller makes movies. You can never be unengaged from them. This one for all the supposed hokum and drop in quality is not greatly different to his best fifties pictures in my mind. Some writers condescendingly ascribe the idea of naivety or fauvist characterisation to the background crew/chorus here. But their dialogue and actions are really cleverly constructed to incorporate them into - literally - a chorus, and a prediction of how the audience will react, without ever taking the spontaneity of the audience's reactions from us. 

The submarine crew here is sociologically and ethnically diverse and emblematic for 50s American movies, as is the group of atomic scientists, nationally and linguistically. Bella speaks at least six languages here as do the crew. Fuller makes a big deal about presenting this diversity.) Perhaps the most unexpected of the crew characters is an almost outrageously openly gay David Wayne, playing a kind of ship jester mostly shot with bare top, in line with the other beefcake specimens of greasepaint and brawn who elaborately depict a backdrop of masculinity and muscle to play off a counterpoint to Fuller's central romance between Adam and Denise. Labor and Science which includes a central, very long take of an astonishing four minutes in the cabin love scene completely saturated and printed in screaming deep Commie and Passion red, to a depth that only the old dye transfer prints could render properly.

The encode is from a splendid new transfer by Fox for Twilight TIme, and the disc is region free**. I've only said this once before in relation to the superb BD disc of Dracula's Daughter and the 30s and 40s Universal Horror cycles but anyone who can't love a movie like Hell and High Water doesn't love movies.

* Editor's Note: David Posted this note on Facebook on September 15, 2017 and reposted it on September 15, 2025.

** No longer available but used DVD copies may be found on eBay.