![]() A red line on the display marked the level at which the losses would be unsustainable. ![]() This was a war of attrition in which no flags were planted and victory was measured in several sinkings instead of dozens, or hundreds of lives lost instead of thousands.Īs Simon Parkin explained in A Game of Birds and Wolves, his 2019 book about anti-submarine warfare in World War II, a chart of Allied shipping losses occupied an entire wall of the operations room at the Admiralty, the Royal Navy’s London headquarters. And while the stakes of a self-contained battle are obvious to the viewer, it’s difficult to pick out a particular convoy among 450 that turned the tide. Winston Churchill, who twice served as First Lord of the Admiralty, insisted that the Battle of the Atlantic was pivotal: Merchant shipping, the leader of the island empire said, “was at once the stranglehold and the sole foundation of our war strategy.” Although that makes the material seem suitably cinematic, a drawn-out defensive action against mostly unseen enemies doesn’t really lend itself to visual set pieces. Convoy escorts supplied the settings for a few movies and TV series made in the decades during and immediately after World War II, but sub-centric movies have almost exclusively represented that theater of war in theaters since then, even as an armada of World War II stories has stormed our screens like Allied landers-some of them featuring Hanks, a Dad Movie titan who starred in Saving Private Ryan and co-produced Band of Brothers and The Pacific. For one thing, there’s the subject matter: one of many extended, non-decisive skirmishes in the Battle of the Atlantic. It’s Krause’s first command, and neither the commander nor his overstretched four-vessel escort force is assured of proving equal to the task.Īlthough several of Forester’s books have been adapted into films (most notably The African Queen), it’s not surprising that it took 65 years for The Good Shepherd to complete its own crossing of the gap between bookstore and cineplex (or in this case, streaming service). On the page and on the screen, Krause is charged with escorting a convoy of 37 ships across the high and hostile seas of the Mid-Atlantic gap, the region where German U-boats operate with impunity beyond the range of coastal anti-submarine aircraft. ![]() Both book and movie revolve around Commander Krause, the American captain of the destroyer USS Keeling in the early stages of U.S. Forester’s last non–Horatio Hornblower novel, The Good Shepherd. Greyhound, which debuts on Apple TV+ on Friday after being bounced from theaters by the pandemic-an “ absolute heartbreak” for its screenwriter and star-and delayed two months from its planned release on the 75th anniversary of V-E Day, is an adaptation of C.S. But the personality surgery he performed for the film also extracted the psychological elements of a story that might have made the movie more than a brief, fast-moving, and forgettable torpedoes-and-destroyers distraction. As a writer/headliner, Hanks approached the problem of portraying a less magnetic man by stripping out some of that character’s unlovable attributes and amplifying his heroism. He did it by embracing an almost impossible task: converting a deliberately dull and uncharismatic book character into a Hollywood protagonist played by irrepressibly appealing leading man Tom Hanks. In adapting the new naval drama Greyhound, Tom Hanks earned the first “screenplay by” credit of his 40-year career.
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