Sink the Bismarck! (1960)

Directed by

Lewis Gilbert

Genre

war film

Country

United Kingdom

Runtime

1h 33m

Rated

NR

Rating

6.8 of 10 from 122 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

During World War Two, the British Royal Navy tries to hunt down and destroy the German battleship Bismarck. The film shows both the strategists in the war room and the sailors at sea.

tensemethodicalgrittyseriousstarkhistoricalsuspensefuldocumentary-like

What happens

Sink the Bismarck! is a 1960 black-and-white CinemaScope British war film based on the 1958 book The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck by C. S. Forester. It stars Kenneth More and Dana Wynter and was directed by Lewis Gilbert. It is the only film made that deals directly with the operations, chase and sinking of the battleship Bismarck by the Royal Navy during the Second World War. Although war films were common in the 1960s, Sink the Bismarck! was seen as something of an anomaly, with much of its time devoted to the "unsung back-room planners as much as on the combatants themselves". Its historical accuracy, in particular, met with much praise despite a number of inconsistencies. Sink the Bismarck! was the inspiration for Johnny Horton's highly popular 1960 song, "Sink the Bismarck", credited by Variety with boosting the film's American gross alone by an estimated half a million dollars. The film had its Royal World Premiere in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh at the Odeon Leicester Square on 11 February 1960. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• The Battle of the River Plate (1956)
• We Dive at Dawn (1943)
• Hell Boats (1970)
• The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
• The Guns of Navarone (1961)
• Above Us the Waves (1955)
• Gift Horse (1952)
• Das Boot (1981)