After his lucrative teaming with Gary Cooper in VERA CRUZ, Burt Lancaster and his partners, Harold Hecht and James Hill, decided to pair Lancaster with the fading but still popular Clark Gable. Gable plays Commander Richardson, the only survivor when the submarine he commands is sunk by a
Japanese destroyer dubbed "Bongo Pete." Back at Pearl Harbor, he is given command of another submarine, the Nerka, but on it he encounters much dissension. Lt. Bledsoe (Lancaster), the sub's executive officer, is upset because he expected to get the command, and the crew refuses to trust a
commander who is the sole survivor of a sunken vessel. Richardson battles frequently with Bledsoe, who is just short of mutinous, and drills the crew repeatedly in a tricky maneuver designed to torpedo "Bongo Pete" head on, an operation he calls the "down the throat shot." Ordered to stay well
clear of Japan's dangerous Bongo Straits, the obsessed commander disobeys and pursues the destroyer. Gable, two years and three films away from death, is plainly too old for his role, but he makes the most of it with a very good performance. The entire film, in fact, is one of the better submarine
dramas ever made, tense and claustrophobic, with a minimum of dalliances back at the base (in defiance of the Hollywood dictum that no movie without a love interest can succeed). On the set, things were rather tense, with Lancaster and his two partners arguing over the script, while Gable worried
about what was going to happen to his character when the dust settled. Although reasonably successful at the box office, RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP was ultimately overshadowed by another film that put an old star and a new star in a submarine, OPERATION PETTICOAT, with Cary Grant and Tony Curtis.
