The film “Submarine” (1928), directed by a young Frank Capra, offers an unusual reflection on the alliance between technical progress and human bonds. In this analysis, Gracia Prats-Arolas and José-Alfredo Peris-Cancio unravel how this pioneering film anticipates current questions about dignity, friendship, and moral responsibility in an age dominated by technology.

The First Part of a Trilogy?

Submarine (1928) is considered by scholars of Capra’s work[1] to be the first in a trilogy that would be completed by Flight (1929) and Airship (1931). They all agree that there are compelling reasons to study the three films together, as if we were looking at a small series. These arguments would be:

a) In all three films, we see the same actors in the roles of the male protagonists: Jack Holt (1888-1951) and Ralph Graves (1900-1977).

b) Likewise, in all three, the plot largely revolves around granting a fundamental role to a technological advancement, a machine, or a device, which is presented as a great advancement in the service of humanity—in the first case, the submarine and diving suits; in the second, airplanes; and the third, hot air balloons, particularly the blimp.

c) Third, all films present how the alliance between human effort and the courage of the protagonists, with technological advances, will contribute to the solution of the problems posed in the plot, leading to a highly emphasized emotional climax at the end of all three films; d) Fourth, they present a friendship between Holt and Graves’ characters, whose strength will be severely tested as they invariably fall in love with the same woman, whom they portray very differently in each film;

e) The varied presentation of the female protagonist will increasingly show the relevance of the female face and of marriage in truly underscoring the equality and complementarity between men and women.

f) Finally, the series appears to owe a great deal to the success of the first film to win an Oscar, Wings (1927), although, as Raymond Carney rightly points out:

… What differentiates Submarine, Flight, and above all, Dirigible from Wings and makes Capra’s influence recognizable is the complexity of the consciousness he creates in the relationship between the two colleagues who star in each of these three films.[2]

The Vindication of an Individualized Study of Submarine (1928)

However, and without denying the many merits of these theses, for our study from a bioethical perspective, it may be more appropriate not to preempt this initial consideration of a trilogy from Submarine and instead study it individually. There are also compelling reasons for doing so:

a) It was the first A-list film that Capra directed at Columbia, after having filmed, as already stated on this same website, five quickies[3], faster B-list films, as the director himself recounted in his autobiography[4].

b) Capra had to take on a project originally intended for another director, Irving Willat (1890-1976), whose work was not convincing to Columbia’s owner, Harry Cohn (1891-1958), so he imbued the film with his own style based on a previously existing project.

c) It was, in fact, Capra’s decisions regarding the film’s greater realism in its portrayal of the person (personalism) that contributed to the film’s success, from which Flight and Dirigible could be conceived as its sequels. There was, therefore, no intention at first to film a series. It was an exercise in trial and error. As Carmen Sofía Brenes points out when reflecting on the creative process in cinema:

… We must remember that the author is not like the man who has hidden a treasure and then goes looking for it right where he put it, pretending to have discovered it. He is, on the contrary, a true explorer who comes to see the meaning of the story he himself created only after having rethought and rewritten it many times.[5]

d) Finally – and this is the most convincing reason for opting for this differentiated treatment by which it is decided to study Submarine individually – between this first film of 1927 and Flight of 1929, Frank Capra shot three others[6], of which the first two, The Power of the Press (1928) and The Youngest Generation (1929), are very relevant for a reflection on technology and progress. Between Flight and Dirigible (1931), Capra directed Ladies of Leisure (1930) and Rain or Shine (1930), with which his penetration into the understanding of the situation of women made possible a female character much more appropriate to the unique and unrepeatable nature of her being person. In short, Frank Capra’s “cinematic learning in action” wasn’t limited to the films in the trilogy, but benefited from his entire output, from how it progressively developed film after film.

A proposal that unites friendship and technology

Submarine is best understood as a proposal that unites friendship and technology. Put simply, Capra shows with the film that technological advances will not replace human agency, human heroism. On the contrary, given its power, technology can present new risks that can only be resolved through personal heroism that creates bonds of friendship.

And again, a strong alliance between film history and technology allows us to extract the evidence, this deeper meaning of the film. Indeed, the Blu-ray edition that Columbia will release in 2024 comes with a reconstruction of the musical score made from the original materials. This makes it clear that Submarine incorporated not only sounds (bumps, sliding, bubbles, etc.) but also two songs that are completely diegetic. The first is “Pals, Just Pals” by Herman Ruby and Drave Dreyer. Its lyrics are repeated several times throughout the film, and its music continually accompanies the film.

It’s very revealing to note its lyrics, as they somehow summarize the film’s message:

My, how I pray. // We’ll always be friends.

Just friends. // No matter when we drift apart.

We’ll still be friends. // Just friends.

We’ve had our share of fun. // We’ve fought over girls.

But after all. // We’re still the same old friends.

And when the time comes to part. // We’ll go as friends.

Just friends.

A tale of friendship that goes beyond the protagonists.

The plot of Submarine can be summarized in a schematic way: a navy diver Jack Dorgan (Jack Holt) and the colleague with whom he communicates during the dives (Bob Mason (Ralph Graves)) have a great friendship; the first is clumsy with girls, the second a flirt; after distancing himself for a while due to service issues, Jack marries a young light Bessie (Dorothy Revier); Jack has a mission in which he is absent for a week, Bob goes to see him during that time and to have fun he flirts with a girl who turns out to be Bessie without knowing that she is married or that she is the wife of his friend; when Jack returns, he introduces Bessie to Bob, and both are unfazed; again Jack has to go to give the report to the General Staff, and upon his return he finds them almost embracing, which he interprets as an abuse from his friend and indignantly expels him from his house, when in reality he was resisting Bessie’s seduction; Bob goes to A continuation of a mission in a submarine, which crashes and falls into a pit where only a diver like Jack can rescue them. Jack refuses out of spite for Bob, until his wife finally confesses that she was the one who took the initiative, without her friend knowing who she was, a week before Jack introduced them. The diver rushes to the sunken submarine and manages to dive to such a depth to deliver oxygen and save them.

However, a plot told in this way has a limitation, which can often be encountered when studying this film, and that is that it fails to reflect other areas of true friendship that exist among the sailors of minesweepers who share a common mission. Already in the first scenes, we see them working as a team, playing jokes, and thus fully engaging with each other in a risky task. See the scene where Jack gets tangled in the rope of the bomb they threw to blow up a shipwrecked ship. In a few tense seconds, Bob jumps into the water to break it and rescue the diver. He does so with the active presence of his fellow divers, who thrill to the action as if they were actually doing it themselves.

An Involvement That Moves to Tears

This type of relationship appears even more intensely in the second part of the film, which focuses on the sunken submarine seeking rescue. There, Bob Mason takes on the responsibility of cheering up his fellow sailors, following the orders of the Submarine’s Commander (Clarence Burton). He jokes, distracts them with card games, but even offers to sacrifice himself for the others when it seems there’s no way out. This involvement reaches a very delicate point when he witnesses the death of the youngest sailor, who was seriously injured when the submarine collided with the destroyer. He can’t help but cry when “the boy” (Arthur Rankin) dies in his arms. And he, in turn, comforts the Commander and gives him a hug when, at the end of the film, Jack manages to reach the submarine and deliver oxygen. His superior officer was shedding tears because seconds before he had been about to shoot him in an attempt to free his comrades from their suffering…

And a story like this one doesn’t do justice to the character of Bessie, who comes across as a femme fatale, whose frivolity ruins the protagonists’ friendship. It’s much more nuanced. On the one hand, the young woman is an expression of the Roaring Twenties lifestyle, which aspired to fun without commitment. A second song that appears diegetically in the film presents the jazz club where she meets and seduces Jack as a kind of heaven. And in the final scene, when Jack has separated from his wife, Bessie appears unabashedly with a new sailor. Rather than a perverse female, Capra presents her as the feminine counterpart to a type of relationship in which sailors treat women as pastimes on their days off. Even Jack, who has taken Bessie seriously and proposed marriage to her, is unable to see her as a person with a vision of freedom of her own. Rather, he conceives of her as a little toy meant to brighten his life. And she finds such a relationship unbearable. In Submarine, Capra is already making an argument for the equal dignity of women, which he will develop increasingly fully throughout his filmography, as we have already begun to see in his B-movies [7].

Submarine emphasizes that the challenges of technology are those of a society of the future, in which the accelerated development of mechanized problem-solving processes, far from demanding a type of person indifferent to others, demands a greater willingness to give of themselves to others. In our days of debate about Artificial Intelligence, the 1928 film marks a sure path for true progress: in the face of an increasingly sophisticated use of technology, there must be a corresponding moral growth in people’s recognition of their dignity, not only in the good ends sought, but also in the capacity to create humane work environments in which a friendship that enhances everything is possible. There is no true friendship, no genuine marriage, no authentic human community without the recognition of others, especially without the recognition of that more vulnerable other who depends on our generous response to them.

Conclusion

With regard to emphasizing the idea of ​​​​recognizing others, it is only fitting that today we conclude this contribution by paying tribute to the recently deceased Pope Francis, also as a voice who spoke prophetically against the “globalization of indifference.” This was recognized at the time by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman when he endorsed the Pope’s words during his visit to Lampedusa. Bauman describes its meaning as an inescapable call to eradicate indifference from our hearts. To achieve this, the first step is to know how to weep for so much cruelty.

Pope Francis calls us to “extirpate from our hearts that part of Herod that beats within them; let us pray to the Lord to give us the grace to weep for our indifference, to weep for the cruelty of our world, of our own hearts and of all those who, from anonymity, make social and economic decisions that open the door to tragic situations like this.” And, having said this, he asks: “Has anyone cried? Has anyone cried today in our world?”[8].

Cinema that makes us laugh often makes us cry, and in those tears there can be something redemptive. We have seen them in the characters of Submarine. The philosopher Catherine Chalier has been able to express this in an almost unsurpassed way, with words that attest to the wisdom of the man who was, until recently, our Holy Father.

When the tears of men wait, quite irrationally on a human scale, for life to be freed from the bitter and fatal travails that keep it prisoner within themselves or within others, as in every creature, do they not always come forth, solitary and invincible, in the hope of a joy still unspeakable, that of a final reunion? It certainly happens very often that men weep without knowing what they are hoping for, or even rejecting it with all their emotional and intellectual strength. It also happens that the word of hope is more indecent than the word of mere compassion when misfortune has struck another. But do not both rejoice when they discover the water of the morning dew, traditionally associated with awakening and resurrection? This feeble happiness, this trembling before the hope of life, in its pure nakedness, is sometimes experienced by human tears.[9]

Gracia Prats-Arolas – Professor and Researcher in Philosophy and Film – Catholic University of Valencia

Jose Alfredo Peris-Cancio – Professor and Researcher in Philosophy and Film – Member of the Bioethics Observatory – Catholic University of Valencia

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[1] For example, Carney, R. (1986). American Vision. The Films of Frank Capra. Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, pp. 101-112; Girona, R. (2008). Frank Capra. Cátedra: Madrid, pp. 126-141; or Sanmartín Esplugues, J., & Peris-Cancio, J.-A. (2017b). Cuadernos de Filosofía y Cine 02. The Personalist Principles in the Filmography of Frank Capra. Valencia: Catholic University of Valencia, San Vicente Mártir, pp. 75-93.

[2] Carney, R., cit., p. 103.

[3] The four that survive have already been published on this website: “Moral Economy as a Criterion for Bioethics in Frank Capra’s “That Certain Thing” (1928); “The Beauty of the Human Face and the Humanization of Technology in Frank Capra’s “So This Is Love” (1928); “The Contrast Between Face and Mask and Its Importance for Bioethics in «The Matinee Idol» («Minnie’s Theater», 1938)”, https://www.observatoriobioetica.org/2025/02/la-contraposicion-entre-rostro-y-mascara-y-su-importancia-para-la-bioetica-en-the-matinee-idol-el-teatro-de-minnie-1938/10003428; “The Dehumanization of the Human Face as a Challenge for Bioethics in “The Way of the Strong” (1928),” https://www.observatoriobioetica.org/2025/03/la-deshumanizacion-del-rostro-humano-como-desafio-para-la-bioetica-en-the-way-of-the-strong-1928/10003837

[4] Capra, F., The Name Before the Title, Madrid, T&B Editores, 20027, pp. 116-126.

[5] Brenes, C.-S. (2011). The Work of the Film Spectator. In E. Fuster & J. García-Noblejas, Rethinking Fiction: Moral Evil on Screens: Dramatic Needs and Industrial Pathologies (pp. 63-74). Rome: EDUSC, p. 65.

[6] We plan to study its relationship with bioethics on this website, God willing.

[7] See note.

[8] Bauman, Z. (2016). Strangers Knocking at the Door. Barcelona: Paidós, p. 14.

[9] Chalier, C. (2007). Treatise on Tears. Salamanca: Sígueme, pp. 223-224.