Every year in time for Memorial Day and Father's Day, a crop of war movies arrives on DVD from at least one home entertainment distributor. This year VCI Entertainment has done the honors, putting out five British combat films that range from very good to excellent, and at least three of them have until now been rather rare on American shores. One of the more famous titles is We Dive at Dawn (1943), and it holds up as a tense, absorbing submarine picture with great attention to detail.

The British submarine Sea Tiger arrives back at base, and the crew begins a week's leave. We follow several of them into their lives, marital issues and other personal problems, until suddenly their leave is cut short and they are ordered out on a secret mission to intercept a new German battleship, the Brandenburg. The plan is to sink the Brandenburg before she enters the Kiel Canal en route to the Baltic Sea. When the Sea Tiger is unable to get there in time, the captain (John Mills) must improvise a dangerous new course of action. Along the way, he picks up three German pilots holed up in a rescue buoy, and the information they may or may not know becomes an important plot point.

Among the British crewmen given central roles, Eric Portman as Leading Seaman Hobson and Niall MacGinnis as Gunner's Mate Mike Corrigan stand out. These fine actors popped up in many good English films over the years, and this one's no exception. Portman gets the best role in the movie, a driven, focused, somewhat unhinged military man with severe domestic problems back home that we sense are always just below the surface of his professional exterior. He seems almost a prototype for Steve McQueen's Pvt. Reese in Hell is For Heroes (1962).

We Dive at Dawn was directed by Anthony Asquith, the son of a British prime minister who was raised in privilege and trained in both European and American filmmaking techniques, thanks to an early apprenticeship in Hollywood with John Ford and other directors. He was 41 when he made We Dive at Dawn and had already directed 18 films, including Pygmalion (1938) starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. He would direct 23 more, including The Way to the Stars (1945), The Winslow Boy (1948), The Browning Version (1951) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). Clearly he was drawn to stage adaptations, but Asquith knew a thing or two about keeping his films visual and fluid. We Dive at Dawn is not based on a play and does not feel stagy, but much of it could have been done as a play, with long sequences set inside the sub and containing much dialogue. The editing and the blocking, however, keep our experience completely cinematic. The point is that even a film like this shows a consistency in the type of material Asquith was drawn to.

And when We Dive at Dawn moves to land, in the film's final act (the Sea Tiger lands on a Danish island in an attempt to refuel), Asquith shows an equally adept hand in action. The island sequence is very solidly exciting, taut and well done -- but not overdone. There is just enough action to keep the film overall on the level of understated realism. Another director might have gone over the top with pyrotechnics, but Asquith smartly keeps it all of a piece.

In the sub sequences, the picture's documentary-like realism is really impressive. The sub's maneuvering, and the muscular effort that is involved in steering the thing, gets a lot of attention, perhaps more than the classic Hollywood submarine movies. The lack of a score, except over the credits, also contributes to the effect.

Although the language is inevitably a bit different (one seaman talks about making it back home by teatime), We Dive at Dawn is otherwise not too unlike a typical Hollywood combat film of the period, with a hero (in this case two), group and objective providing a narrative foundation for the movie. One difference that is striking, however, is in the film's treatment of social class. In American combat films, all the members of the group, regardless of their backgrounds, are made equal in a combat unit (military rankings aside). Here, one is acutely aware of the class differences among the men, which probably says more about British society and the way it is unavoidably presented in almost all British films, rather than anything specific about the British military.

In addition to this picture, VCI has just released The Way to the Stars (1945), Malta Story (1953), Above Us the Waves (1955), and Sea of Sand (1958) -- all typically evocative British titles. All are worthwhile, but The Way to the Stars and Above Us the Waves are the more famous standouts, and both again star John Mills. Malta Story (mistakenly labeled The Malta Story on VCI's packaging) is especially interesting for the first screen teaming of Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins, who would appear again in three more movies (though they wouldn't always have scenes together): The Prisoner (1955), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Sea of Sand, about a British commando mission in North Africa, perhaps inspired Andre De Toth's much better Play Dirty (1968).

Picture quality is fine on these discs except for Sea of Sand, which is slightly washed out and not as sharp as the others. We Dive at Dawn and Above Us the Waves are the best-looking transfers of the bunch.

For more information about We Dive at Dawn, visit VCI Entertainment. To order We Dive at Dawn, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold