Action in the North Atlantic

Action in the North Atlantic is a 1943 American black-and-white war film from Warner Bros. that dramatizes the work of the United States Merchant Marine, the civilian fleet that carried supplies to the Allies under German U-boat attack during World War II. Directed by Lloyd Bacon and produced by Jerry Wald, it runs 126 minutes and stars Humphrey Bogart as First Lieutenant Joe Rossi and Raymond Massey as Captain Steve Jarvis, merchant officers who survive the torpedoing of their tanker and sail a Liberty ship in a convoy bound for Murmansk in the Soviet Union.¹

Production

The film began as a planned two-reel documentary tribute to the Merchant Marine, but as the war progressed Warner Bros. expanded it into a full-length feature with more opportunity for dramatic action.¹ Because of the heavy losses suffered by merchant ships in the early months of American involvement in the war, producer Jerry Wald had the film in production just five weeks after receiving the assignment; two ships were built on Warner stages before screenwriter John Howard Lawson completed the script, which carried the working title "Torpedoed" (an alternate title was Heroes Without Uniforms).^{7 • 1}

<b>Studio-bound realism.</b> The entire film was shot on Warner Bros. sound stages, since the War Department's wartime restrictions barred filming at sea.^{7 • 2} The elaborate special effects needed a controlled environment: the old freighter destroyed in the film burned for several days in a tank on the studio's Stage Nine, its flames produced by dozens of gas jets operated from a valve console. Director Lloyd Bacon and his assistant sometimes wore masks against the heat and smoke, and Bacon once nearly choked to death from smoke inhalation. The production ran 45 days over schedule, shooting from September 3 to late November 1942.^{7 • 1}

The technical advisor was Richard Sullivan, a 23-year-old Merchant Marine cadet who was one of two survivors of a U-boat attack on his vessel.¹ Contemporary press releases announced Edward G. Robinson and George Raft as intended stars before Bogart and Massey were cast.¹

Wartime purpose and reception

The film was conceived as a morale booster and tribute at a moment when the U-boat campaign was killing merchant seamen in large numbers; German submarines sank hundreds of vessels and killed more than 9,000 American merchant mariners during the war.⁸ TIME called it "a celluloid glorification of the U.S. merchant marine" and noted its lineage from pulp serials, while observing that Warner Bros. was allowed to fly a special Maritime Service Victory Flag for making it.⁹ The New Yorker's David Lardner, reviewing it in May 1943, judged the tribute generous and the acting effective, while finding the picture too long.¹⁰

The War Shipping Administration valued the film's technical content enough to use it in Merchant Marine schools, and the studio donated three prints for official use at the Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, and at cadet basic schools in San Mateo, California, and Pass Christian, Mississippi.¹ Henry J. Kaiser, the shipbuilding magnate, wanted it shown to all his war builders as a morale measure.⁷

<b>Race and politics.</b> According to a September 1942 article in the Pittsburgh Courier, Bogart wanted to include a black Merchant Marine captain in the film, saying that "the color of a man's skin should have nothing to do with his rights in a land built upon the self-evident fact that all men are created equal." The character did not appear.¹ The historian Penny Summerfield of the University of Manchester notes that the 1943 film gave the Merchant Navy rare attention in the context of the leftward drift of wartime politics while still avoiding the depiction of non-white merchant seamen.¹¹

The film's pro-Soviet elements aged badly. When the convoy reaches Murmansk, Soviet workers greet the mariners with shouts of "Tovarisch!", and in 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee placed the film on a blacklist, treating the dialogue as a subversive message planted by Communists.³ Screenwriter John Howard Lawson, a fellow traveler who modeled his script partly on Soviet montage cinema with Battleship Potemkin as a reference, was one of the Hollywood Ten and in 1948 was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for refusing to cooperate with HUAC.^{7 • 12} Bogart's reply in the scene, "I'm just thinking about the trip back," was often cut from American television broadcasts during the Cold War.⁵

Later distribution

The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Story for Guy Gilpatric.³ In a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of 15 May 1944, which also featured George Raft, Raymond Massey and Julie Bishop returned to the parts they had played in the film.¹ In West Germany, the Allied Information Control Division withdrew the film from distribution after the scene in which a German submarine commander deliberately runs down a lifeboat caused disturbances in cinemas in Bavaria and Bremen.¹³

The film remains available on streaming and home video and holds an IMDb rating of 7.0/10 from about 5,000 users.¹⁴ A 2004 study in The Journal of American Culture by W. Russel Gray examined it as a wartime propaganda vehicle that developed themes similar to those of Casablanca.¹⁵

References

1. Action in the North Atlantic (1943), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
2. Facts about Action in the North Atlantic, Classic Movie Hub
3. Action in the North Atlantic, uboat.net Naval Warfare Movies
4. Action in the North Atlantic, Cinegraph
5. Action in the North Atlantic (1943) on Netflix, NetflixMovies.com
6. Action in the North Atlantic (1943), Cinnamon DB
7. Action in the North Atlantic, by Scott McGee, Turner Classic Movies
8. World War II Shows Why We Need the Merchant Marine, by William Geroux, TIME
9. Cinema: The New Pictures, June 7, 1943, TIME
10. Toilers of the Sea, by David Lardner, The New Yorker, May 29, 1943
11. Divisions at Sea: Class, Gender, Race, and Nation in Maritime Films of the Second World War, 1939–60, by Penny Summerfield, Twentieth Century British History
12. Action in the North Atlantic, Time Out film review
13. Censorship, Scripts, Suppression, and Selection, Swansea University repository
14. Action in the North Atlantic streaming online, JustWatch
15. Navigating Propaganda's Sea Lanes: A Fresh Look at Action in the North Atlantic, by W. Russel Gray, The Journal of American Culture 27(1), 2004

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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