The combination of content and title in Battle of the Coral Sea might just have (and perhaps should have) provoked riots, or at least angry complaints to theater managements back in 1959 -- mostly because the event known to history as the Battle of the Coral Sea is barely mentioned anywhere, except at the beginning and end of the film, and hardly more than glimpsed, and even the two minutes of footage that purports to be action from that event is, at least, in part, drawn from other events and also from other (better) Hollywood movies. Otherwise, we get lots of talk and small-scale action in this picture, involving submarine commander Cliff Robertson and a mission to scout enemy forces in the area where the battle of the title was to take place. He gets the information, but is also captured along with a handful of his surviving crew and put into one of the most comparatively humane Japanese POW camps ever seen in a US film. And though one very likable supporting character is brutally murdered against the orders of the commandant, it all still looks like a very nasty summer camp compared to what we saw in, say, Bridge On The River Kwai etc. Discussing plot details, or even any virtues in the acting or much else about the picture is pointless in so patently ridiculous a story, which only gets worse as it progresses, with the prisoners -- including a female Australian nurse interned with male prisoners . . . -- making a daring escape, to a kind of cliffhanger denouement that stretches credibility to the breaking point one last time. Director Edward L. Cahn was an expert at making minor classics out of very little and even something out of nothing, but here the script gave him less than that to work with -- just one or two good actors and a bunch of others trying to earn a paycheck and a chance at something better -- and the end result is a movie that must have been an embarrassment to all concerned at the time. It's difficult to imagine that even drive-in audiences wouldn't have felt cheated by the promise of the title against what was delivered, and any actual navy veterans might even have been offended. What's left today can only elicit unappreciative laughter of the worst kind, and a grotesque example of bad studio product near its nadir.