Sealed Cargo
| Sealed Cargo | |
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| Directed by | Alfred L. Werker |
| Produced by |
Warren Duff Samuel Bischoff |
| Written by | Edmund Gilligan (novel) Dale Van Every Oliver H. P. Garrett Roy Huggins |
| Starring |
Dana Andrews Carla Balenda Claude Rains |
| Music by | Roy Webb |
| Cinematography | George E. Diskant |
| Edited by | Ralph Dawson |
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Production
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| Distributed by | RKO Radio Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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87-90 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Sealed Cargo is a 1951 American war film about a fisherman, played by Dana Andrews, who gets tangled up with Nazis and their U-boats. It was based on the novel The Gaunt Woman by Edmund Gilligan.
In 1943, at the height of the World War II Battle of the Atlantic, Captain Pat Bannon, skipper of the fishing trawler Daniel Webster, unloads his catch in his home port of Gloucester, Massachusetts. He reluctantly agrees to transport Margaret McLean to Trabo, a small community in Newfoundland. Shorthanded, he hires Danish sailor Konrad, and the Daniel Webster sails for the Grand Banks fishing grounds. Once at sea, another Dane, Holger, reports that the radio has been sabotaged. As Bannon knows all of the crew well except for Konrad and fellow Dane Holger, he suspects one of them or even Margaret of being a German agent.
Sailing at night in heavy fog, they hear gunfire. They search for survivors and come upon the damaged Den Magre Kvinde (Danish for The Gaunt Woman), a Danish square rigged sailing ship. She appears to have been damaged in a storm and then shelled. Aboard, they discover only the dazed Captain Skalder and a dead body. He claims that his crew abandoned ship in a storm, and that he was subsequently attacked by a U-boat. The Daniel Webster tows the stricken Kvinde to Trabo.
Konrad is suspicious: he notes that the German gunfire hit above the waterline (rather than below it, where a gunner intending to sink a ship would aim), and that while the tarpaulin covering the ship's boat is riddled with bullet holes, the boat itself is undamaged. Bannon and Konrad separately sneak below decks to search the hold. When they meet, Konrad has a pistol, but he gives it to Bannon to prove where his loyalties lie. They accidentally discover a second, hidden hold containing rack upon rack of torpedoes — the ship is a tender, covertly resupplying the U-boat "wolfpacks". They watch undetected as Holger enters the hold and uses a radio to signal the Germans. However, before the pair can alert the military, Skalder's crew arrives in boats, so they pretend they know nothing. Skalder plans to resupply the U-boats at Trabo.
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