In short: City Beneath the Sea (1953)

Two salvage divers – straight arrow Brad Carlton (Robert Ryan) and his friend and partner, the morally more flexible Tony Bartlett (Anthony Quinn) – travel to Jamaica for a rather delicate operation. They are tasked to salvage one million dollars in gold bouillon from a sunken ship. At first, they find nothing at the coordinates provided them by the local contact (Karel Stepanek) of their employer.

Instead of going home again, both men decide to stay on Jamaica and romance some ladies in that horrifying 50s style you don’t have to be particularly woke to raise all available eyebrows at. Brad takes time getting to know boat captain Terry McBride (Mala Powers), while Tony sets his eyes on a night club singer working under the nom de plume of Venita (Suzan Ball). Eventually, their dithering and many a scene of “romance” will lead our protagonists on the trail of the gold again. Turns out, that local contact is involved in a rather huge insurance fraud.

But what, one might ask, about the titular “City Beneath the Sea”? Well, our heroes use the awkward looking ruin to locate the gold, that’s all.

It is not only the title of Budd Boetticher’s City Beneath the Sea that emphasises the wrong things – unfortunately, what is sold as an adventure movie in the classic style really isn’t much of that. The search for the gold takes a back seat for most of the movie. Instead we have to endure Ryan’s and Quinn’s characters acting like traditional male chauvinists for what feels like hours, some unfunny comedy, a musical number and other distractions in a film that seems to have no interest at all in its purported plot. Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the distractions were actually interesting and fun, or would make use of Boetticher’s considerable talent for complex characterisation and explorations of human relationships. Alas, even with the considerable charm of Ryan and Quinn, the distractions never feel like anything but dithering, or desperate attempts at getting the film to feature length. From time to time there’s an interesting detail – like the way Tony very emphatically greets the black Dijon (house favourite Woody Strode) as a peer after having been introduced to him as their contact’s “boy” – but this is not a film where those details add up to very much, as much as I’d like them to.

Even the adventure scenes that are in the movie aren’t terribly great – the focus on slow, slow, oh so very slow diving sequences doesn’t play to Boetticher’s strengths as a director at all, what with it mostly showing our heroes bobbing up and down in their – now old-timey – diving gear.

All of which leaves City Beneath the Sea as a film only of minor interest even for Boetticher (or Ryan, or Quinn, etc) completists.