Voyage Of The Damned

This fact-based story about an ocean liner carrying 937 German Jewish ex-patriates which was sent by the Nazis to Havana in May 1939 but was denied permission to land has a remarkable cast including Orson Welles, James Mason, Denholm Elliott, José  Ferrer, Lee Grant, Julie Harris and Wendy Hiller none of whom, with the exception of Faye Dunaway who looks extraordinary as a kind of sea-going dominatrix vamp and Max Von Sydow as the ship’s principled captain, make a blind bit of difference to a film which lumbers its way through a shapeless narrative with a complete lack of conviction, every now and then breaking into some poorly staged piece of over-wrought melodrama.

The idea of a group of profoundly stressed people confined together on a sea voyage, one moreover that leaves them stranded and in growing fear of their lives has, needless to say, a lot of dramatic potential. Director Stuart Rosenberg and writers Steven Shagan and David Butler however working from a book ‘The Voyage of the Damned’ by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, seem to have absolutely no idea how to connect the various characters and their stories in interesting ways. Instead they slide around from one to other with, at best, diligence, at worst ham-fisted histrionicism. That’s when they are not struggling with wildly inappropriate casting choices (Malcolm McDowell as a cocky German cabin boy and Katharine Ross as a nice Jewish girl turned whore down Havana way stand out).  

The most remarkable thing about this considerably costly production is how it consistently succeeds in disappointing.

FYI: Jonathan Pryce makes his feature debut as a shaven-headed refugee whilst Oskar Werner retired from film-making after this film. Both Ferrer and Werner had appeared in another star-stuffed and only slightly less unsatisfactory film about a group of disparate characters aboard an ocean liner, Stanley Kramer's Ship Of Fools (1965). Malcolm McDowell whose career was already on the slide (he got this job because Jon Voight turned it down), had previously appeared with Phillip Stone, who plays the Belgian official at the film’s end, in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971),

 

Want something different?