The title to this review is according to legend the remarks of Noel Coward when coming out of a screening.To those of you too young to know Gamages was a big department store on the corner of High Holborn and Grays Inn Road,which in its toy department sold lots of model planes and boats.If you look at the battle scenes it is quite apparent that the crew of this film have never been further than the water tank that used to be situated under the floor of the main stage at Ealing.There are lots of familiar faces such as the up and coming Michael Wilding and Stewart Granger.This is essentially stiff upper lip flag waving material.Which is enjoyable if rather dated,so just suspend your disbelief when watching this.

Not bad for the period, a mixture of the usual war-time conflicts and adventures. Unlike those of the post-war era, the ships involved here are fictional. There is no Bismarck, Scharnhorst, or Gniesenau but instead a formidable German battleship called the Deutschland, driven away from the titular convoy by more lightly armed British escorts. The Brits also sink a U-boat.

The British -- officers and civilians alike -- are heroic and give their lives willingly. The Germans, surprisingly, are treated as puppets of Hitler, but not especially brutal puppets. They're given a chance to argue their point of view.

There is a negligible romantic conflict between the captain of the British destroyer (Clive Brook) who is stern, courageous, and a little distant, and his newly assigned lieutenant (John Clements). Clements, it seems, had run off with the captain's wife (Judy Campbell) and then unceremoniously dumped her. The wife, however, had merely formed a friendship with Clements after deciding she would leave Brook in any case. It's suggested that there was no exchange of fluids between the lieutenant and the wife. This misunderstanding is cleared up when the U-boat torpedoes a merchant ship full of refugees, and one of the refugees happens to be Lucy, the woman in question. Why did Lucy leave, you ask? Why do all wives have problems with husbands who are making a career of the military. John Wayne had dozens of such wives and girl friends. "You're married to the Navy," and so on.

There are several naval engagements that aren't too badly done, given the strictures on the production of motion pictures. It is, after all, 1940, and Britain doesn't have a massive budget allowance for movies. The battles at sea depend mostly on model work, some of it more convincing than others. It's disconcerting to see a shell splash near a ship and send up a plume of sea water with drops as big as basketballs. There are interpolated shots of real convoys and warship at sea.

The performances are of professional caliber with everyone hitting his or her marks and speaking their lines credibly. There are small roles for Stewart Granger and for Michael Wilding. Wilding's is so small that I missed it entirely. There are weaknesses in the editing that are likely to confuse the viewer momentarily. Overall, pretty good, considering the context.

Even though this film was a flag waving gift to the British war effort, this did not take away from the interesting plot that was contained within the story. Two officers of the same war ship has been married to the same woman and she just so happens to be on a transport vessel that the Germans plan to sink. This is the rub of the story as now conflict between the two officers must be settled before engaging the Germans in a sea battle. And as you can guess from a 1940 British war movie, the allies are going to give their best as the brutes from central Europe try to advance on the people of Great Britain. For a fast paced early war movie, this was played well by the actors. But for some reason, the filming studio decided, perhaps to save money, used a large amount of miniatures during most of the film which took away from the viewing pleasure. It was probably necessary to use miniatures for some of the fight scenes but this film went well overboard by filming all actors in a studio environment using a water tub for close-up scenes of ships. It was so obvious and useless that they even used studio tanks for lazy shots of a ship that was calm in the water. Overall the film, even with its cheap looks, did entertain enough to make the story interesting to the end. A bit of help from the studio would have made this project much better.