It also played on German television as a miniseries, six episodes of 50 minutes each, including recaps from the previous show, for five hours total. There was a European version during its initial release, and an American one that ran a hair under 2½ hours. There are more versions of “Das Boot” than can be easily counted. They essentially acted as more or less autonomous rovers, hunting for juicy targets and wallowing in misery and boredom otherwise. It was a war of attrition Germany was destined to lose, as too few U-boats were available to stop the convoys of supply ships and destroyers feeding the Allied strength. The soldiers in “Das Boot” are German naval seamen who are, in some ways, at the most forward front in the war against Britain: the North Atlantic sea battle of late 1941 and early 1942. The Confederacy fought for the preservation of slavery, our country’s original sin, but that hardly obliterates the great gallantry shown by many of its officers and foot soldiers. Shunting aside that claim is easy, since the strength in writer/director Wolfgang Petersen’s finely-crafted workmanship is that the submariners are depicted as real flesh-and-blood creatures with all sorts of varying qualities - some of them vile but a few of them noble, too.īesides, it is a fundamental flaw in human thinking (and thereby our cinema) to believe genuine heroism cannot be performed in service to a cause that is evil.
#Dasboot 1981 movie
I remember the movie causing quite a stir at the time - in part because foreign films rarely got mainstream attention in America but also because it was a German film that was purported to show German soldiers as brave and competent. It’s not one of those films that slides in under the radar and whose reputation is burnished with the passing of years seeing it, you immediately sense you are in the presence of greatness. A German submarine war epic is not exactly first pickings for most preadolescent kids, so I can only imagine my parents’ reaction when I asked them to take me to see it. “Das Boot” is one of the first foreign films I saw more or less contemporarily to its debut in U.S.
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