Fighting Sea-Fleas

This Canadian Navy short documentary about the Navy's motorized torpedo boats is a competently produced affair, shot with hand-held cameras for extreme moving point-of-view shots. This works well to increase the tension, until we shift to battle footage -- mostly shots of flares going off in a night sky.

On its own it is not particularly remarkable, although John Ford seems to have lifted some of the battle shots for his 1945 feature THEY WERE EXPENDABLE. Still, the viewer may be interested when he realizes that the film is narrated by Lorne Greene and that it was directed by Sidney Newman, who later moved to Great Britain and was responsible for the creation of two perennials of the small screen: "The Avengers" and "Doctor Who."