BY JOHN M. WHALEN

Sam Fuller is one of these iconic directors that independent film makers like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodrigues idolize for being a maverick who frequently got away with making movies his own way, even if the studios that employed him didn’t always like it. But even though he preferred to make hard hitting, semi-expose movies like “Shock Corridor” and “The Naked Kiss,” Fuller also knew which side of the bread was buttered and could make a movie that both he and his studio bosses knew could be a commercial success. “Hell and High Water” (1954), released by 20th Century Fox, is one of those. Made at the height of the Cold War, it capitalized on America’s fear of the atom bomb, the Red Menace, and catered to the belief that private individuals can sometime be more effective than government at solving the world’s problems.

A group of such individuals, scientists from around the world, want to investigate suspicious activities on an island in the North Atlantic by the Chinese communists (though their nationality is never mentioned). They hire former submarine commander Capt. Adam Jones (Richard Widmark) to take them to the island in a rebuilt Japanese sub (the kind that Captain Jones calls “a sewer pipe”). The scientists suspect that the island is being used as the site for the building of an atom bomb and are scheming to start WW III. Fuller had a hand in writing the screenplay as well as directing and so Capt. Jones is your typical Fuller hero. He’s tough, he’s brash, he’s honest, and he’s cynical. He agrees to take the idealistic scientists to their destination but only because they’ll pay him 50 G’s to do it.

He assembles some of his old crew, including Gene Evans (a Fuller regular), and Cameron Mitchell, the sub’s sonar man. The lead scientist in charge of the expedition is Professor Montel (Victor Franken), who is fond of saying: “Every man has his own reason for living, and his own price for dying.” Just for the sake of spicing things up a bit, the old professor brings along an assistant-- a sexy young French female scientist played by Bella Darvi. Darvi’s personal story is both interesting and tragic. She was discovered in Monaco by Darryl Zanuck and his wife Virginia. Mrs. Zanuck thought she had star potential and even created Bella’s screen name. Darvi is a combination of Darryl and Virginia. She made only three Hollywood movies before a sex scandal involving Zanuck broke out, causing Virginia Zanuck to split. Darvi’s career never really took off and after the scandal she returned to Europe where she eventually committed suicide at age 42.

But to return to our story, of course, the presence of a woman on board a salvaged Japanese sub manned by a bunch of horny, sweaty guys is a totally believable thing and isn’t going to cause any sort of plot complication. But then believability isn’t a word you’d associate with “Hell and High Water.” Especially not when the sub encounters another submarine, (Chinese? I guess, who knows for sure) demanding to know what the hell they’re doing there. What follows is the usual cat and mouse sequence you find in most submarine movies. After a torpedo is fired at them, they dive for the bottom. The torpedoes on Jones’s sub don’t work because they didn’t have time to get them in working order before they started out. They stay there trying to not make any noise so they don’t get pinged by sonar. The other sub lands a few hundred yards away and they try to outwait each other. Finally, Jones and his men have had enough and the captain orders the ship to make a break for it. He’s got a new plan. He rams the “sewer pipe” into the other sub and sinks it. Hooray, the good guys win. But wait. This is supposed to be a peaceful scientific expedition. What about all the Chinese sailors (or whatever they are) killed on the other sub? Wouldn’t that be like an international incident? Wouldn’t that actually be an act of war itself that might lead to WWIII, just the very think they were trying to prevent?