Charles Laughton, Gary Cooper & Cary Grant in “Devil and the Deep“ (1932)

Charles Sturm (Charles Laughton) is a naval commander whose jealousy and abuse makes life miserable for his wife Diana (Tallulah Bankhead). His suspicions fall on his own subordinate, Lieutenant Jaeckel (Cary Grant). Although his suspicions are baseless, Sturm has Jaeckel transferred. After Charles falls into another fit of paranoid rage and strikes Diana, she wanders off into the streets during a festival and soon encounters another officer, who turns out to be Jaeckel’s replacement, Lieutenant Sempter (Gary Cooper). Learning of their affair, which this time is real not imagined, Charles plots a terrible revenge. On the night Cmdr. Sturm’s submarine is to sail, Diana goes aboard to warn Lt. Sempter of Sturm’s dangerous frame of mind. But when Sturm arrives, he immediately orders the sub out to sea before Diana can return to shore. In the busy channel outside the harbor, Sturm deliberately maneuvers into the path of an oncoming ship, which rams and sinks the sub. Several compartments are flooded, but the crews are able to get out in time. Trapped on the bottom, the survivors gather in the control room; Sempter and Sturm square off, asserting command, while Diana exposes Sturm’s madness. Sempter takes control and organizes the crew’s escape. In a detailed and substantially accurate technical sequence, Diana and the crew exit through the sub’s escape trunk using Momsen lungs, and are rescued at the surface. Refusing to leave the ship, Sturm stays behind and lapses into raving insanity; he opens a watertight door to let in the sea, laughing maniacally as the water rises. Afterwards, cleared of most charges by a court martial, Sempter encounters Diana again in a shop on the street. Soon it begins to rain, and they depart in a cab together. A 1932 American pre-Code drama film directed by Marion Gering, based on Maurice Larrouy’s novel, “Sirenes et Tritons“, starring Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, Cary Grant, Paul Porcasi, Juliette Compton, Henry Kolker, Dorothy Christy, and Arthur Hoyt. Film debut of Peter Brocco. In 1932, Tallulah Bankhead told an interviewer that she only accepted this role so that she could “!@*k Gary Cooper.“ Both the submarine (named MG9) and the merchant/passenger ship (that Cpt. Sturm rams) are clearly scale models. This is the only film featuring both Gary Cooper and Cary Grant as the movie’s leading men, but they never appear together onscreen. However, in the following year’s film version of “Alice in Wonderland“, Grant played the Mock Turtle and Cooper played the White Knight, having their only movie scene together as the entire cast appears in the tea party scene (including W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty). The film was generally well received by critics. David Fairweather of Theatre World stated: “This picture is, in my opinion, the best dramatic talkie we have yet seen. It is unabashed melodrama at times, but Charles Laughton’s magnificent acting disarms criticism of the more violently sensational incidents ...Tallulah Bankhead has better opportunities than of late as the distrait wife, but she is overshadowed by Laughton’s amazing performance.“ The New York Times review, “Charles Laughton, the English actor, whose portrayal in the play “Payment Deferred“ won high praise here and in London, makes his film début in “Devil and the Deep,“ an adaptation of a story by Harry Hervey, which is now at the Paramount. Notwithstanding the unimaginative direction of several of the sequences, the hesitant and often trite dialogue, this melodrama, owing to the excellent work of Mr. Laughton and Tallulah Bankhead and a most interesting climatic episode, succeeds in being something out of the ordinary and a picture that always holds one’s this narrative of a husband’s jealously of his wife, Mr. Laughton plays the rôole of Charles Sturm, a submarine commander, and Miss Bankhead impersonates his wife, Pauline. Mr. Laughton’s enunciation is very English, and although the rôle, perhaps, is not as well suited to his style as that of the bank clerk in “Payment Deferred,“ he gives a clever characterization. Whatever weaknesses there are in his performance are evidently due to the direction and the lines. Sturm is quite an ingratiating person in public, but in his home the sole topic of discussion concerns his wife’s affair with one or another junior officer ... Gary Cooper gives a sympathetic and vigorous interpretation as Lieutenant Sempter ... But Mr. Laughton’s forceful and resilient portrait is the outstanding histrionic are some curious conceptions of naval procedure and uniforms, but as the country to which the officers belong is not named, this is not an important point, except that, because of Mr. Laughton’s intensely English delivery, one is apt to conclude that he is impersonating an officer of the British Navy, and therefor one wonders at the peculiar uniforms, as well as at the idea of having a four-striper in command of a submarine.“