But they are given impossible orders - how can they slip through the Gibraltar defenses to get to their port in the South of France, with the allied Navy in such firm control? By sheer willpower, good seamanship and superhuman effort, the Captain and his crew manage to avoid constant attack and make it to secret harbor in Portugal. German air support and intelligence is weak and British destroyers seem to be everywhere, and no longer making mistakes. With the once-feared wolfpacks reduced to 12 lone submarines, Captain Lehmann-Willenbrock (Jürgen Prochnow) sets out once more to hunt allied shipping. The story begins in 1941, just as things are getting tough for the German U-boat service. This 2-disc Blu-ray release gives the viewer a choice of two versions and a number of extras. Das Boot plays so well in any form that it somehow never seems long. A later DVD restored restore the entire five-hour German miniseries version to DVD. This is the fourth Das Boot release for Columbia and perhaps the first time that the original theatrical version has been presented on disc. in an excellently dubbed theatrical version, Das Boot was taken as a superior war film that really made one feel how cramped and uncomfortable it would be to ship out on one of those old "pig boats." It led to an impressive international career for director Wolfgang Petersen. But for dramatic intensity and claustrophobic realism, none can hold a periscope to the German film, Das Boot. There have been some rather good submarine movies made - Run Silent, Run Deep and The Enemy Below come to mind. Visuals of submarines underwater are so generic that as late as the '80s, the same 1943 Warners tank shots of torpedoes bubbling their way under the water were still being re-used. The sets required to produce one are so limited that any studio that could muster adequate effects for the cutaways to the action outside, could make one reasonably cheaply. American submarine movies have been around since the silent days.
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