The Hunt for Red October (film)

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The Hunt for Red October
Image:The Hunt for Red October movie poster.JPG The Hunt for Red October movie poster
Directed by	John McTiernan
Produced by	Mace Neufeld
Written by	Tom Clancy (novel The Hunt for Red October) Larry Ferguson Donald Stewart
Starring	Sean Connery Alec Baldwin Scott Glenn Sam Neill James Earl Jones
Music by	Basil Poledouris
Cinematography	Jan de Bont
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	March 2, 1990 (U.S. release)
Running time	134 min
Language	English
Budget	$30,000,000 (estimated)
IMDb profile

The Hunt for Red October was a 1990 film based on the best-selling novel of the same name. It starred Sean Connery as Ramius and Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan, and featured James Earl Jones, Scott Glenn, Sam Neill, Richard Jordan, Joss Ackland, Peter Firth, Jeffrey Jones, Fred Dalton Thompson, Courtney B. Vance, Tim Curry, and Stellan Skarsgård.

1 Synopsis
2 Critical reaction
3 Featured cast
4 Quotes
5 Trivia
6 External links
7 Other Navy-related films of interest

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Marko Ramius is captain of the Soviet Union's newest ballistic missile submarine, the Red October, equipped with a revolutionary silent propulsion system known as the Caterpillar drive. At the start of the movie, he is shown taking out the boat to sea ostensibly for its first exercise with other units of the Russian Fleet. The captain, however, has another plan - to navigate the submarine to the coast of America in order to defect.

To achieve this, he must murder his political officer, who, alone amongst his officers, was not hand picked in support of this action. After this is done, he reads substitute orders to his crew to support the mission, and begins his long journey. He is, at first, discovered and tracked by the USS Dallas, an American attack submarine, but upon activation of the Caterpillar Drive he is able to break away.

Meanwhile, Soviet authorities read a letter posted by Ramius prior to his departure, announcing his intention to defect. The Soviet Navy immediately puts to sea to locate and sink the Red October. This causes a stir in Washington when the activity triggers a reciprocal deployment of US assets as Russian intentions are unclear.

At this point a CIA analyst named Jack Ryan, who had been researching the submarine as a project, puts forth the proposition that Ramius may be defecting with the Red October. The President's National Security Advisor, Jeffrey Pelt suggests that Ryan go to the North Atlantic Fleet and somehow make contact with the submarine before the US is forced to sink it as a rogue threat.

After surviving both an attack from Soviet Naval Aviation and an onboard saboteur, the Red October passes through an underwater route, where the USS Dallas, through the efforts of a diligent SONAR operator Ronald "Jonesey" Jones, locates it again. They are forced to break contact by the arrival of Ryan, who has deduced that the Dallas had indeed found the characteristic signature of the Red October's drive, and was able to locate her.

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Ryan convinces the captain of the Dallas, Bart Mancuso, to make contact with the Red October to facilitate the defection. All goes well until Soviet torpedoes are heard in the water, from an attack submarine that has also found the Red October. Concurrently, the saboteur planted by the KGB, an enlisted member (cook) of the crew, reveals himself by shooting at the captain, wounding him and killing the executive officer, Vasily Borodin. Ryan and Ramius go after the cook, while Mancuso takes command of the Red October to deal with the external threat. Ryan kills the cook, and the V.K. Konovalov, the Soviet attack submarine, is destroyed by its own torpedo after a series of maneuvers by Mancuso. Ultimately the submarine finds haven in an American river, and Ryan flies home with a big present for his daughter.

[edit] Critical reaction

The film received mostly positive critical reviews when released and was one of the top grossing movies of the year. Rotten Tomatoes [1] gives the film a 95-percent positive rating. Nicholas Schager, for a 2003 Slant Magazine review, notes, "The Hunt for Red October is a thrilling edge-of-your-seat trifle that has admirably withstood the test of time." [2]

The success of the film likely played a part in the development of several later submarine-oriented movies such as Crimson Tide, U-571, and K-19: The Widowmaker. Also, the popularity of the renowned Sean Connery and young, handsome Alec Baldwin played a major role in the advertisement of this thriller.

[edit] Featured cast

Image:Red october sean.jpg

Actor	Role
Sean Connery	Capt. Marko Alexandrovich Ramius
Alec Baldwin	Dr. John Patrick "Jack" Ryan
Scott Glenn	Cmdr. Bartolomeo Vito "Bart" Mancuso
Sam Neill	Capt. 2nd Rank Vasily Borodin
James Earl Jones	V-Adm. James Greer
Joss Ackland	Ambassador Andrei Lysenko
Richard Jordan	Dr. Jeffrey Pelt
Peter Firth	Political Officer Ivan Yurevich Putin - Red October
Tim Curry	Dr. Yevgeniy Konstantinovich Petrov - Red October
Courtney B. Vance	Sonar Technician 2nd Class Ronald "Jonsey" Jones - USS Dallas
Stellan Skarsgård	Capt. Viktor Alexeyevich Tupolev - V.K. Konovalov
Jeffrey Jones	Oliver Wendell "Skip" Tyler
Timothy Carhart	Lt. Bill Steiner
Anthony Peck	Exec/Lt.Cmdr. "Tommy" Thompson - USS Dallas
Larry Ferguson	Chief of the Boat, Watson - USS Dallas
Fred Dalton Thompson	R-Adm. Joshua Painter - USS Enterprise
Daniel Davis	Capt. Charlie Davenport - USS Enterprise
Sven-Ole Thorsen	Russian Chief of the Boat - Red October

[edit] Quotes

Mr. Pelt (talking to Ryan after the others leave the N.S. briefing)- Look, I'm a politician. That means when I'm not kissing babies, I'm stealing their lollipops.

Mr. Pelt - "Mr. Ambassador, you have over a hundred naval vessels operating in the north Atlantic right now! Your aircraft have dropped enough sonar buoys so that a man could walk from Greenland to Iceland to Scotland without getting his feet wet... now, shall we dispense with the bull?"

Soviet Ambassador - "You make your point as delicately as ever, Mr. Pelt."

Skip Tyler - "When I was twelve, I helped my daddy build a bomb shelter in our basement because some fool parked a dozen warheads ninety miles off the coast of Florida. This thing could park a couple hundred warheads off Washington or New York and no one would know anything about it 'till it was all over."

Ramius - "And the sea bring new hope to men just as sleep brings new dreams."

Captain Mancuso - "I get this straight Jonesy? A forty million dollar computer tells you you're chasing an earthquake, but you don't believe it, and you come up with all this on you're own.. including all the navigation..."

Jonesy (an incoherent stammering response)

Mancuso - "Relax Jonesy you sold me."

Tupolev - "Go to 105% on the reactor."

Konovalov first officer - "Captain... what is it? Where are we going?"

Tupolev - "We are going to kill a friend Yvgeni... we are going to kill Ramius."

Admiral Painter(referring to Jack Ryan) - "You think he's crazy?"

Capt. Davenport - "Certifiable. And no matter what his credentials I don't care for him wearing the uniform."

Admiral - "You see that ring on his finger? The Academy, Class of '72, a Marine."

Captain - "You're kidding! How did you...?"

Admiral - "Greer told me. Summer of his third year he went down in a chopper accident in the Med. Bad... pilot and crew killed. That kid spent ten months in traction, and another year learning to walk again. Did his fourth year from the hospital. Now it's up to you Charlie but you might consider cutting the kid a little slack."

[edit] Trivia

The take where Dallas and Red October are rising to periscope depth alongside each other has been used in the pilot episode of the TV series SeaQuest DSV.

Many of the actors playing American sailors took a cruise on a real submarine to get a feel for their roles. Scott Glenn, who played the commander of the USS Dallas, trained for his role by temporarily assuming the identity of a submarine captain (the sub's crew all took 'orders' from Glenn, who was being prompted by the actual commanding officer). (Glenn does have military experience in real life, as a U.S. Marine.)

The film's USS Dallas is a real Los Angeles-class attack submarine. It did not appear in the film, and there are conflicting sources as to which submarine(s) played Dallas.

The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry website, and other sites, claim that the USS Blueback, a Barbel-class submarine appeared in the film, playing the USS Dallas performing an emergency surfacing. This is disputed by some sources, including the Wikipedia entry on the Blueback (as of August 2006). The entry states that another Los Angeles-class sub, the USS Houston played the role of the Dallas. (It could be that both subs were used, for different scenes.)

Klaus Maria Brandauer was originally cast as Marko Ramius. Coincidentally, Brandauer played opposite Sean Connery in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again. The two were again cast together in the 1990 film adaptation of John LeCarre's Cold War drama, The Russia House.

Videotapes of the movie were specially made; the parts of the videocassette that are normally black were molded in red plastic. This was apparently an anti-pirating measure.

The climax of the book and the movie present one significant difference. In the book, the Red October rams the broadside of the pursuing Soviet submarine, damaging its prow but destroying the enemy; in the film, the Red October (with the assistance of the USS Dallas) draws a torpedo fired by the enemy submarine to hit that enemy vessel, and escapes undamaged.

The altered opening credits sequence for the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "In a Mirror, Darkly" shows a scene from The Hunt for Red October of a submarine firing a torpedo.

In The Simpsons' episode 3F19 "When You Dish Upon A Star", Comic Book Guy shouts to Alec Baldwin, referring to the film: "Alec! Alec! Regarding that so-called "silent propulsion system" in The Hunt For Red October. I printed out a list of technical errors which I think you'd enjoy discussing!"

In promotions for the The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, one trailer used the scene from the movie in which Jonsey hears singing.

British reviewers noted that the actors playing the Russians all retained their natural accents (making for a particularly marked contrast in the case of Connery's Scottish accent).

Peter Firth has also appeared in the British espionage drama Spooks

There were several other movies made based on Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, but Alec Baldwin did not return to play Jack Ryan in them; instead, Harrison Ford stepped in, and later Ben Affleck.

There is a dialogue error in the final cut of the film: when Captain Mancuso enters the Red October for the first time he says "Central Intelligence Agency...now there's a contradiction in terms." The correct put-down would have referenced "Military Intelligence" or "Government Intelligence".

An inspiration for the book was submarine captain Jonas Pleškys, Lithuanian by birth. In 1961, after his vessel set out from Klaipėda to Tallinn he ordered it and its entire crew to sail to Sweden. The Soviet authorities sentenced him in his absence to death by firing squad, but the CIA hid him, first in Guatemala and later in America.

Jack Ryan films

Alec Baldwin: The Hunt for Red October

Harrison Ford: Patriot Games | Clear and Present Danger

Ben Affleck: The Sum of All Fears