Stand By For Action - Production, Release and Reception

Production, Release and Reception

A number of titles were considered for the film which became Stand By for Action, including Cargo of Innocence – the name under which the film was released in the United Kingdom, A Cargo of Innocents, Men O'War, Clear for Action, Navy Convoy, This Man's Navy and Pacific Task Force. Although film was shot in Hollywood, it was originally scheduled to be filmed in late 1941 at the MGM studio in England, with Clarence Brown directing Robert Donat and Edmund Gwenn, but production was shifted to California because of the war situation. The original intention was that the film would be about the British Nazy in the Atlantic Ocean, but after the U.S. entered the war, the story was changed to focus on the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, the first naval war film made by MGM.

The film premiered on New Year's Eve 1941 in a number of cities, including Boston, Providence, Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Norfolk, Virginia, San Diego, California and San Francisco, but MGM had previously screened the film for naval officers on bases in California.

The critical response to the film was not good, with the reviewer for Yank magazine saying that the film was "not about The War, but about Hollywood's War," and other reviewers comparing it to In Which We Serve, the 1942 British naval film written by and starring Noël Coward and directed by Coward and David Lean, with the earlier film being deemed superior. Bosley Crowther, the film critic for the New York Times, thought that Charles Laughton's performance was not his best, an opinion that Laughton himself agreed with, saying that it was like something out of H.M.S. Pinafore. Despite the poor reviews, Stand By for Action was successful at the box office.

The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Special Effects (A. Arnold Gillespie, Donald Jahraus, Michael Steinore).