Das Boot 1981 Hindi Dubbed Torrent
Lenora Glanzer
An adaptation of Lothar-Gnther Buchheim's 1973 German novel based on his experiences aboard German submarine U-96, the film is set during World War II and follows U-96 and her crew, as they set out on a hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. It depicts both the excitement of battle and the tedium of the fruitless hunt, and shows the men serving aboard U-boats as ordinary individuals with a desire to do their best for their comrades and their country.
Development began in 1979. Several American directors were considered three years earlier, before the film was shelved. During production, Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, the captain of the real U-96 during Buchheim's 1941 patrol and one of Germany's top U-boat "tonnage aces" during the war, and Hans-Joachim Krug, former first officer on U-219, served as consultants. One of Petersen's goals was to guide the audience through "a journey to the edge of the mind" (the film's German tagline Eine Reise ans Ende des Verstandes), showing "what war is all about".[2]
Lieutenant Werner is a war correspondent on the German submarine U-96 in October 1941. He is driven by her captain and chief engineer to a raucous French bordello, where he meets some of the crew. Thomsen, another captain, gives a crude drunken speech to celebrate his Ritterkreuz award, in which he mocks Adolf Hitler.
The next morning, U-96 sails out of the harbour of La Rochelle, and Werner is given a tour of the boat. As time passes, he observes ideological differences between the new crew members and the hardened veterans, particularly the captain, who is embittered and cynical about the war. The new men, including Werner, are mocked by the rest of the crew, who share a tight bond. One Nazi officer, 1-WO (the first [watch] officer), is disliked by the others due to his pro-Nazi beliefs and meticulous grooming habits that hogs up the one bathroom that the entire crew has to share. After days of boredom, the crew is excited by another U-boat's spotting of an enemy convoy, but they are soon spotted by a British destroyer and bombarded with depth charges. They escape with only light damage.
The next three weeks are spent enduring a relentless North Atlantic gale. Morale drops after a series of misfortunes, but the crew is cheered temporarily by a chance encounter with Thomsen's boat. Shortly after the storm ends, the boat encounters a British convoy and quickly launches three torpedoes, sinking two ships. They are spotted by a destroyer and have to dive below test depth, the submarine's rated limit. During the ensuing depth-charge attack, the chief machinist, Johann, panics and has to be restrained. The boat sustains heavy damage but is eventually able to safely surface when night falls. A British tanker they torpedoed is still afloat and on fire, so they torpedo it again, only to learn sailors are still aboard. The crew watches in horror as the sailors leap overboard and swim towards them. Neither able nor willing to accommodate prisoners, the captain orders the boat to back away.
The crew finishes resupplying and departs for Italy. As they carefully approach the Strait of Gibraltar and are just about to dive, they are suddenly attacked and heavily damaged by a British fighter plane, wounding the navigator, Kriechbaum. The captain orders the boat directly south towards the North African coast at full speed, determined to save his crew even if he loses the boat. British warships begin shelling and they are forced to dive. When attempting to level off, the boat does not respond and continues to sink until, just before being crushed by the pressure, it lands on a sea shelf, at the depth of 280 metres. The crew works desperately to make numerous repairs before running out of oxygen. After over 16 hours, they are able to surface by blowing their ballast tanks, and limp back towards La Rochelle under cover of darkness.
The crew is exhausted when they finally reach La Rochelle on Christmas Eve. Shortly after Kriechbaum is taken ashore to a waiting ambulance, British planes bomb and strafe the facilities, wounding or killing many of the crew. Ullmann, Johann, the second watch officer, and the Bibelforscher are killed. Frenssen, Bootsmann Lamprecht, and Hinrich are wounded. After the raid, Werner leaves the U-boat bunker in which he had taken shelter and finds the captain, badly injured by shrapnel, watching his U-boat sink in the dock. Just after the boat disappears under the water, the captain collapses and dies. Werner rushes to his body and helplessly surveys the grim scene with tears in his eyes.
In late 1941, war correspondent Lothar-Gnther Buchheim joined U-96 for her 7th patrol, during the Battle of the Atlantic.[6][7] His orders were to photograph and describe the U-boat in action. In 1973, Buchheim published a novel based on his wartime experiences, Das Boot (The Boat), a fictionalised autobiographical account narrated by a "Leutnant Werner". It became the best-selling German fiction work on the war.[8] The followup sequel Die Festung by Buchheim was released in 1995.[9]
Production for this film originally began in 1976. Several American directors were considered, and the Kaleun (Kapitnleutnant) was to be played by Robert Redford. Disagreements sprang up among various parties and the project was shelved. Another Hollywood production was attempted with other American directors in mind, this time with the Kaleun to be portrayed by Paul Newman. This effort primarily failed due to technical concerns, for example, how to film the close encounter of the two German submarines at sea during a storm.[citation needed]
The film features both Standard German-speakers and dialect speakers. Petersen states in the DVD audio commentary that young men from throughout West Germany and Austria were recruited for the film, as he wanted faces and dialects that would accurately reflect the diversity of the Third Reich around 1941. All of the main actors are bilingual in German and English, and when the film was dubbed into English, each actor recorded his own part (with the exception of Martin Semmelrogge, who only dubbed his own role in the Director's Cut). The German version is dubbed as well, as the film was shot "silent", because the dialogue spoken on-set would have been drowned out by the gyroscopes in the special camera developed for filming. Unusually, the film's German version actually grossed much higher than the English-dubbed version at the United States box office.[11][12]
Several different sets were used. Two full-size mock-ups of a Type VIIC boat were built, one representing the portion above water for use in outdoor scenes, and the other a cylindrical tube on a motion mount (hydraulic gimbal) for the interior scenes. The mock-ups were built according to U-boat plans from Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.
The outdoor mock-up was basically a shell propelled with a small engine, and stationed in La Rochelle, France, and has a history of its own. One morning the production crew walked out to where they kept it afloat and found it missing. Someone had forgotten to inform the crew that an American filmmaker had rented the mock-up for his own film shooting in the area. This filmmaker was Steven Spielberg and the film he was shooting was Raiders of the Lost Ark.[13] A few weeks later, during production, the mock-up cracked in a storm and sank, was recovered and patched to stand in for the final scenes. The full-sized mock-up was used during the Gibraltar surface scenes; the attacking aircraft (played by a North American T-6 Texan / Harvard) and rockets were real while the British ships were models.[citation needed][14]
A mock-up of a conning tower was placed in a water tank at the Bavaria Studios in Munich for outdoor scenes not requiring a full view of the boat's exterior. When filming on the outdoor mockup or the conning tower, jets of cold water were hosed over the actors to simulate the breaking ocean waves. A half-sized full hull operating model was used for underwater shots and some surface running shots, in particular the meeting in stormy seas with another U-boat. The tank was also used for the shots of British sailors jumping from their ship; a small portion of the tanker hull was constructed for these shots.
During the filming there was a scene where actor Jan Fedder (Pilgrim) fell off the bridge while the U-boat was surfaced. During the played rescue, Bernd Tauber (Chief Helmsmann Kriechbaum) really broke two ribs.[15] This event is often purported as Jan Fedder breaking the ribs.[16]
The interior U-boat mock-up was mounted five metres off the floor and was shaken, rocked, and tilted up to 45 degrees by means of a hydraulic apparatus, and was vigorously shaken to simulate depth charge attacks. Petersen was admittedly obsessive about the structural detail of the U-boat set, remarking that "every screw" in the set was an authentic facsimile of the kind used in a World War II U-boat. In this he was considerably assisted by the numerous photographs Lothar-Gnther Buchheim had taken during his own voyage on the historical U-96, some of which had been published in his 1976 book, U-Boot-Krieg ("U-Boat War").
Throughout the filming, the actors were forbidden to go out in sunlight, to create the pallor of men who seldom saw the sun during their missions. The actors went through intensive training to learn how to move quickly through the narrow confines of the vessel.
Most of the interior shots were filmed using a hand-held Arriflex of cinematographer Jost Vacano's design to convey the claustrophobic atmosphere of the boat. It had two gyroscopes to provide stability, a different and smaller scale solution than the Steadicam, so that it could be carried throughout the interior of the mock-up.[17]
As a Leutnant zur See in the autumn of 1941, Buchheim joined Kapitnleutnant Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock and the crew of U-96 on her seventh patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic.[6][7] On 27 October 1941, U-96 left for her seventh patrol and joined group Stotrupp three days later. The next day, 31 October, the group made contact with convoy OS 10. U-96 launched four torpedoes at a long range, one of which struck the Dutch SS Bennekom. The ship went down half an hour after being hit, taking nine of her crew of 56 with her.[18]Following the attack, the sloop HMS Lulworth arrived on the scene and forced U-96 under water with gun fire. The U-boat escaped the barrage of 27 depth charges unscathed.[19] The next day, U-96 encountered two more of the escorts, HMS Gorleston and HMS Verbena, but managed to escape again.
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