Plot
John Wayne stars as U.S. Navy Captain Rockwell "Rock" Torrey, a divorced "second generation Navy" son of a career Chief Petty Officer. A Naval Academy graduate and career officer, Torrey is removed from command of his heavy cruiser for "throwing away the book" when pursuing the enemy and then being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. After several months of desk duty ashore in Hawaii and recuperation from a broken arm he suffered in the attack on his cruiser, he is promoted to Rear Admiral and given a crucial mission early in 1943 requiring the same sort of guts and gallantry he previously displayed as commanding officer of his cruiser.
Though it makes use of the same heroic persona that Wayne displayed in his Westerns, this one is very much restrained under Otto Preminger's direction. We learn more of the character's human qualities: his estrangement from his son, now an Ensign in the Naval Reserve (played by Brandon deWilde), and his romance with a divorced Navy Nurse Corps Lieutenant (played by Patricia Neal), which brings out his yearning for a stable emotional anchor in his life. The Wayne/Neal relationship forms the emotional crux of the movie, and the two stars give sensitive performances.
There are subplots involving characters played by Kirk Douglas and Tom Tryon, who offer differing portraits of two other career naval officers associated with Torrey's command. Douglas portrays Commander, later Captain, Paul Eddington, a wayward sort of career officer who has resigned as a Naval Aviator and returned to the Surface Navy because of an unhappy marriage. His wife's numerous "love" affairs and drunken escapades have become the talk of Honolulu and her death during the Pearl Harbor attack – in the company of an Army Air Corps Officer (Hugh O'Brian), with whom she just had a wild fling on a local beach – drives Eddington into a bar brawl, a stint in the Brig, and exile as the "...officer in charge of piers and warehouses..." in what he calls a "backwater island purgatory." He is reprieved by Torrey and assigned as his Chief of Staff, but his instability drives him to the rape of Navy Nurse Annalee Dohrn (Jill Haworth) who is engaged to Torrey's son. The traumatized nurse, fearing she might be pregnant, commits suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. As the truth is about to be revealed, Eddington (a qualified Naval Aviator) requisitions a PBJ patrol bomber and flies solo on an unauthorized reconnaissance flight to locate elements of the Japanese fleet. He goes down to a fiery death in a redeeming act of sacrifice, finding and giving advance warning of the huge Yamato battleship task force on its way to blast Torrey's much smaller force off the islands. Tryon portrays Lieutenant, junior grade, later Lieutenant and Lieutenant Commander, William "Mack" McConnell, a conventional type of young surface naval officer only a few years removed from the Naval Academy, with a characteristic Navy wife of the period (played by Paula Prentiss), who is ever solicitious and faithful, a true family man with an enviable marriage, in stark contrast to Eddington's almost tragic and isolated figure.
The film presents a relatively unromanticized and realistic picture of the American Navy and its officers in the period before and shortly after the start of World War II, complete with bureaucratic infighting among the brass and sometimes disreputable private acts by individuals. Its sprawling narrative is typical of Preminger's works in which he examined institutions and the people who run them (such as the American Congress and the Presidency in Advise and Consent, the Catholic Church in The Cardinal and the British Intelligence Service in The Human Factor).
Read more about this topic: In Harm's Way
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—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
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