Gordon Douglas's Up Periscope was made primarily as a vehicle for James Garner, a newly-minted television star (of Maverick), to see if he could draw audiences into theaters as well (he could). But as a World War II thriller, it was caught in between the gap between the modestly budgeted, intensely personal brand of war movie typical of the 1950's, and the bigger budgeted epics of the 1960's. It was made in color and shot in Warnerscope; and it has a very colorful (and fairly large) supporting cast -- including Alan Hale, Jr., Carlton Carpenter, Henry Kulky, and a young Warren Oates (stealing scenes in his first movie role) -- but its budgetary limitations are obvious as well. The latter include the Max Steiner title theme, which is recycled from two earlier Warner Bros. war movies; and the extended dialogue sequences that cover screen time that might, in a bigger budgeted movie, be filled with more expensive action scenes. The psychological conflict at the center, between the James Garner and Edmond O'Brien characters, seems to have come out of Robert Wise's Run Silent, Run Deep, which is a better movie, but as for the rest, it's fairly diverting, at least once, and this was the kind of war movie that baby-boomers loved to watch because it pretended to more than it actually delivered, in terms of depth. It's superficial but diverting fun, with a slightly greater humor content than was usual in a film like this.