About the Torpedoes

Colonel Effingham's Raid lives or dies pretty much on your love for Charles Coburn. Since The More the Merrier is one of our top 10 favorites, we were pretty happy.

Coburn plays Col. Effingham as his usual character - irascible, old-fashioned and overbearing. He has moved back to his home in small-town Mississippi after a long career in the Army. The town is run by the Down Home party, a slightly crooked bunch of pro-business demopublicans who want to tear down the old courthouse so the Mayor's brother-in-law can rebuild it on a no-bid contract. When the Col. finds out about this, it's, well, "what Admiral Farragut said. About the torpedoes."*

This is framed by a love story about Coburn's nephew, played by William Eythe, and Joan Bennett (from TV's Dark Shadows), who work together on the town's smaller paper. The background is the coming World War II (the movie was made in 1946, set in 1940).

But there's a problem underneath this patriotic element: These southerners are always ready to defend their country - or to rebel against it, as the Col. is a big supporter of the Lost Cause and the Confederate Heroes. And the government is made up of scoundrels and crooks, so we should ignore elections and run the town based on mob-rule, led by retired army officers. Without the indomitable Charles Coburn, this flimsy froth quickly falls apart.

* If you haven't seen The More The Merrier, Coburn's catchphrase is "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" This is delicately rephrased in Colonel Effingham's Raid by the Col.'s elderly sister.