La critique de Roger Ebert (fin)

"The Hunt for Red October" has more than a dozen important speaking roles, in addition to many more cast members who are crucial for a scene or two. Any film with a cast this large must depend to some extent on typecasting. We couldn't keep the characters straight any other way. What McTiernan does is to typecast without stereotyping.

Sean Connery makes a convincing Ramius, and yet, with his barely concealed Scots accent, he is far from being a typical movie Soviet.Baldwin, as the dogged intelligence officer, has the looks of a leading man, but he dials down his personality. He presents himself as a deck-bound bureaucrat who can't believe he has actually gotten himself into this field exercise. And Scott Glenn, as the commander of a U.S.submarine that finds itself within yards of the silent Red October, is leaner, younger, and has more edge than most of the standard movie skipper types.

The production design lends a lot to the movie's credibility.I'm told that the interiors of submarines in this movie look a good deal more high-tech and glossy than they do in real life - that there would be more grease around on a real sub - and yet, for the movie screen, these subs look properly impressive, with their awesome displays of electronic gadgetry. The movie does not do as good a job of communicating the daily and hourly reality of submarine life as "Das Boot" did, but perhaps that's because we are never trapped and claustrophobic inside a sub for the whole movie. There are cutaways to the White House and CIA headquarters in Langley, to the Kremlin and to the decks of ships at sea.

If there's one area where the movie is truly less than impres sive, it's the underwater exterior shots. Using models of submarines, the filmmakers have attempted to give an impression of these behemoths maneuvering under the sea. But the outside of a submarine is not intrinsically photogenic, and what these shots most look like are large, gray, bloated whales seen through dishwater.

And yet that lapse doesn't much matter. "The Hunt for Red October" is a skillful, efficient film that involves us in the clever and deceptive game being played by Ramius and in the best efforts of those on both sides to figure out what he plans to do with his submarine - and how he plans to do it. The movie is constructed so we can figure that out along with everybody else, and that leaves a lot of surprises for the conclusion, which is quite satisfactorily suspenseful. There was only one question that bothered me throughout the movie. As one whose basic ideas about submarines come from Cmdr.