I'm going to sink her.

Murphy’s War

(1971)

More evidence of Peter Yates’ post-Bullitt struggle for interesting material. There’s nothing very compelling about this WWII story of an Irish survivor of a British ship sunk by a German U-Boat off Venezuela. It’s certainly difficult to see why Yates and producer Michael Deeley chose to make it rather than The Godfather (to be fair, anyone but Coppola would have made The Godfather decidedly less memorable).

It could have been made any time in the previous 15 years, and thus feels curiously out of synch with the new era of filmmaking that both Yates and O’Toole were very much a part of (the downbeat dénouement excepted). Perhaps the director thought it would give him the chance to do for flying what Bullitt did for driving (there are copious flying sequences, as O’Toole fixes up a plane utilises it to hunt down the U-Boat). Indeed, these scenes are very proficient, but they do go on. As does the film as a whole.

O’Toole clearly relishes his exaggerated Oirish accent, but it begins to wear thin quite quickly. By the time he has happened upon another plan to get even with the Germans (with a torpedo from their sub) his obsession has grown a mite tiresome. Jolly and austere support respectively from Philippe Noiret and Sian Phillips.

**1/2

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