Didn't everything they steal go down with the ship? couldn't they try to retrieve it before the coast guard?
And its hard to believe the Guard will just sail away into the sunset with out confirming casualties or trying to arrest them before they rammed them.
You're correct in the "hard to believe" bit - that whole ramming sequence was terribly amateurish and lazily done. Of course, sometimes budget constraints force the director's hands, but the end product was quite laughable nonetheless.
About the loot: The 2 bags full of cash was left on the rowing boat, and never hauled inside the U-boat. The Coast Guard ship was approaching so fast that the pirates didn't have time for that, the guys just jumped inside and the sub immediately submerged, leaving the loot outside in the rowing boat.
That is another "loose end" that wasn't tied up - no effort made by either the Queen Mary, the Coastal Guard or the surviving crew with the yellow inflatable to retrieve that rowing boat. And why didn't the Coast Guard pick the inflatable up at least? Again, lazy screen-writing or editing.
I'm not quite sure that the Coast Guard made "no effort" to retrieve the rowing boat. I don't recall there being any shots to depict that one way or the other. Of course, we would have to assume that they did retrieve the 2 bags full of cash. I found it absurd that the pirates would not spend another 20 seconds to quickly haul those cash bags into the sub, but as it turned out that would have been irrelevant anyway.
The most amazing "hard to believe" bit I would think is why did they attempt this heist so close to shoreline, and face the threat of a Coast Guard intervention? A little further out to sea, and they would have been free and clear. Unless the sub didn't have that additional range maybe?
Good points you made, and I didn't take note of the closeness to the shoreline before, but that is something professional thieves would have considered.
Perhaps certain scenes ended up on the cutting room floor - for whatever reason - that would have cleared up a few questions. Maybe it was implied that the Coast Guard retrieved the boat & cash, but I got the impression that they were satisfied having rammed the submarine and considered it a job done, and so left the scene, not minding the rowing boat & inflatable. Of course, that's just a presumption, and I may have missed a key piece of footage or part of the script. A real Coast Guard patrol wouldn't operate like that, anyways, so I could well be mistaken.
Hopefully I'll pick up a few loose threads with a second viewing.
They had to be forced to leave the loot in the Queen Mary's launch because of the Hays Code. Criminals could not be depicted profiting from their crimes. That's the basic reason for the Coast Guard cutter showing up in the nick of time to foil their robbery and keep them from getting away with it.
Chalk this up to yet another interesting idea for a film reduced to crap because of the asinine Hays code requirements.
Not sure this is simply a result of the Hays Code...
The original novel, previously titled, in a slightly different form "The U-19s Last Kill" (Saturday Evening Post serial), had a... similar ending.
The robbery goes off perfectly.
The loot is abandoned (Either {in the U-19 version} the box is too big to fit down the sub's hatch and there is no time to unpack it. Or the four large sacks are too bulky to load in the really short time before the destroyer arrives {Assault version}) The Nazi is prevented from launching the real torpedoes. The Navy destroyer (not Coast Guard cutter, in the novel) apparently loses the sub after the Queen moves off. It is suggested that they thought they were dealing with a modern sub and assumed it was faster, had greater ability to dive deep... And in any event probably they felt compelled to accompany the passenger liner.
Our modern pirates just don't know exactly how they got away. The survivors, (and they all survive, Nazi included), sneak away in the sub. The sub is allowed to sink and everyone says their goodbyes.
Like I said, similar. Less melodramatic. No more believable. But both (or all three if you see the U-19 version as a seperate entity) versions are very memorable, very entertaining and I love em all.
BTW - I saw the movie at the theater on a double bill, I think with Thunderball when I was about nine or ten and probably read the novel before I was twelve. When I re-read it a few years ago, I was surprised to discover that the sub in the novel was a WWI boat... And you though the suspension of disbelief involved in fixing up a twenty+ year sunk sub was tough. How bout a forty year sunk sub?