Submarine Attack


La Grande Speranza, retitled Submarine Attack and Torpedo Zone in English, is an Italian anti-war film starring Lois Maxwell, Renato Baldini and Earl Cameron. It won the Special Prize of the Senate of Berlin, and the OCIC Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Marcantonio Bragadin was an adviser on the film, which was shot inside and on the deck of a real submarine.

Plot summary

An Italian submarine captain conducts successful attacks on enemy merchant shipping in the eastern Atlantic Ocean during World War II, and then rescues the survivors of his victims, including a member of the Canadian Women's Army Corps. The captain's compulsion to save his victims culminates in his taking aboard 24 additional Danish merchant seamen; with no space down below, they are accommodated under the walkway outside the hull, at risk of drowning if the submarine is forced to submerge. He then sails the survivors hundreds of miles across the open ocean on the surface to put them ashore in the Azores.

Cast