This was reportedly Frank Capra's first A-level feature film, and you can see it in the increased number of locations and sets. However, this was the era when even A-level feature films were written in a few weeks, shot in a few weeks, and editing in a few days. If something snuck into the film without anyone noticing, there wasn't enough time to fish it out and find another way around it, and something like that happens here, undermining the film's entire climax making it and one of its characters surprisingly distasteful. Still, Capra's craft is well on display, especially when it comes to managing actors' performances, and Submarine is a serviceable little entertainment from right before the sound era.
Jack (Jack Holt) is a navy diver, and his best friend Bob (Ralph Graves), is his telephone man when Jack goes on his dangerous descents into the sea while sailing on a minesweeper to help clear out wrecks at the bottom of the ocean floor. They josh each other all the time, especially in the way that Bob, clean faced and suave, steals all of Jack's girls from him. They get split up when Bob gets assigned to a submarine, and Jack ends up meeting Bessie (Dorothy Revier) at a club with whom he instantly falls in love with and marries.
Now, the first half of the film or so is not the most compelling portrait of friendship, naval life, or new love I can imagine from the era (John Ford's Men Without Women covers a lot of the same ground and does it a bit better, they in fact share some major plot points), but it's functional. It mostly works when portraying the relationship between Jack and Bob, but they're separated pretty quickly and we get Jack and Bessie instead. Bessie is drastically underwritten, especially since she ends up being a major lynchpin in the story, and I don't think Capra or Dorothy Howell, the writer, give a good accounting of Bessie as a character.
Well, things take their turn when Jack has to go out on maneuvers for a week, leaving Bessie alone right at the same time that Bob comes to San Diego on his own week-long furlough. Bessie, being evil, goes to her nightclub without her wedding ring, lies to Bob about being single, and starts a weeklong affair with him. Bessie can just be a vacuous, unfaithful tramp, but she had also been married to Jack for three months before this, implying that there's something else about her than just needing a good time. The movie gives no more, and we're just left with this thin portrayal of an evil young woman.
Anyway, the problem with the third act starts when Jack comes home, finds out that Bob and Bessie have had their affair, and he breaks off the friendship with Bob. That's fine, and all, but then Bob goes out on maneuvers, his submarine (finally! A submarine!) gets struck accidentally by another ship, ends up at the bottom of four hundred feet of water, and the divers present can't make the trip down while surviving the pressure from that much water. Jack...insists on being out of touch because he's still mad at Bob.
You can see how this creative decision was made and how it seemed to make sense at the time. Jack is angry with Bob, and so Jack won't go to help. The problem is that Bob isn't alone, and Jack knows it. Jack knows there are a couple of dozen other men in that submarine at the bottom of the water that only he has the skills to get to, and he's letting them suffer and potentially die because of a tiff with his best friend. Sure, it was a great betrayal (who to blame gets sorted out later), but he's willing to let dozens of his men at arms die for it. It's a choice that automatically felt wrong to me, and it all seems designed to stretch out the action of the third act as long as possible. The actual action of the third act is tense and well-done, but it's undermined by the narrative framing. And, of course, the boys end up reconciling and casting off Bessie to be best friends all over again.
I should say that this is also the least Frank Capra movie of Capra's young career. There's no big guy vs. Little guy dynamic at play, it's just a love triangle dealing with men in a dangerous profession. It actually ends up feeling more like an early work of Howard Hawks than Frank Capra (though Hawks wouldn't have ended quite this way, nor would Bessie have been this unredeemable).
If it hadn't been for that weird disconnect in Jack's actions late, I wouldn't have been nearly as bothered by the arbitrariness of the extended action of the third act, but that combined with Bessie's underwritten nature makes me think that while Submarine might have been Capra's first shot at a serious budget at Columbia, it was a near miss artistically.
