Devil and the Deep

Commander Sturm runs a submarine station in North Africa and a marriage by jealousy, his wife takes a night with a stranger who turns out to be the new lieutenant, and Sturm takes the boat out with both of them aboard and sinks it. Charles Laughton, in his first American film, plays the commander smiling and sweating, a man delighted by his own cruelty, and goes down with the ship by choice in a flooded control room. The melodrama around him would be nothing without him. Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper; Cary Grant is in it for a scene. Marion Gering for Paramount, 1932.