Themes: Woman In Jeopardy, Ship Cruises, Disasters at Sea
Main Cast: Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, George Sanders, Edmond O'Brien
Release Year: 1960
Country: US
Run Time: 91 minutes
Plot
Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone are Cliff and Laurie Henderson, a married couple on a vacation with their young daughter (Tammy Marihugh), taking their first sea voyage aboard the aging ocean liner Claridon. All is well for them, but not for the ship below decks, where a fire has broken out. The engine room crew, led by Chief Engineer Steven Pringle (Jack Kruschen) and 2nd Engineer Walsh (Edmond O'Brien) extinguish the blaze, but the ship's captain (George Sanders) refuses their request to shut down the boilers and check for further damage. Disaster follows as the boilers explode, taking Pringle with them and blasting a hole through to the upper decks and an opening to the sea that's not only too big to patch but allowing in too much water for the pumps to handle. Still, the Captain won't order the passengers to the lifeboats -- he hopes that the engine room crew under Walsh can hold the bulkhead and keep the ship afloat. Meanwhile, Cliff has to rescue his daughter from their wrecked stateroom, and must do what he can to help Laurie, who is trapped beneath a huge piece of steel bulkhead, while the ship slowly loses its battle with the sea. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Review
The Last Voyage was a neat little thriller in its time, a precursor to The Poseidon Adventure and a dozen less-well-known disaster movies of a dozen years later, with the action pitched on a more personal level. The acting is good enough, and the direction by Stone is competent, though he lacks inspiration -- the one truly great shot in the movie comes up so abruptly, and is so effective when it comes up, and is so uncharacteristic of the rest of the movie that it comes as a shock to the viewer, and is all the more effective for it. The script has problems that aren't helped by Dorothy Malone's shaky acting in a role that she seems to have been uncomfortable with, but the sheer energy of the performances, the editing, and the direction help audiences get past those deficiencies. They aren't quite enough to get us past a narration that should have never had been put onto the audio track in the first place, but absent that misjudgment by the makers, this is a movie that holds up remarkably well across four decades, and far better (and in less campy fashion) than some of its 70's-era descendants, with good performances by George Sanders, Edmond O'Brien, and Woody Strode (in one of the best roles of his career). ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Woody Strode - Hank Lawson; Jack Kruschen - Chief Engineer Pringle; Joel Marston - Third Officer England; George Furness - Osborne; Richard Norris - Third Engineer Cole; Robert Martin - Second Mate Mace; Bill Wilson - Youth; Andrew Hughes - Radio Operator; Marshall Kent - Quartermaster; Tammy Marihugh - Jill Henderson
Laurie and Cliff Henderson and their daughter Jill are relocating to Tokyo and decide to sail to Japan on board the SS Claridon. A fire in the boiler room is extinguished quickly, but not before several safety valves have been fused shut. When Chief Engineer Pringle attempts to open one of them, a huge explosion rips through the boiler room and the many decks situated above it, killing him and passengers and trapping Laurie under a steel beam in her stateroom, in addition to opening a huge hole in the side of the ship. Most of the action revolves around Cliff's efforts to free his wife before the vessel sinks.
Other key characters are Captain Robert Adams, a rather arrogant and clueless man who likes to impress his passengers and intimidate his crew and officers; Second Engineer Walsh, who lost his father on the RMS Titanic and has a premonition the Claridon will meet a similar fate; and crewman Hank Lawson, who helps rescue the endangered Hendersons.
Production
The film originally was scheduled to be shot in CinemaScope off the coast of England, but instead it was filmed almost entirely in the Sea of Japan off the coast of Osaka. The ship used in the film was the legendary French luxury liner SS Ile de France, which had been in service from 1926 until 1959, when it was sold to a Japanesescrapyard. Her former owners initially attempted to block Stone's rental of the ship (for $1.5 million), [1] but withdrew their opposition when MGM agreed not to identify the vessel by its original name when publicizing the film. [2]
The ship was towed to shallow waters, where jets of water shot onto the ship from fireboats [1] flooded forward compartments and made it appear she was sinking by the bow. Her forward funnel was sent crashing into the deckhouse and her Art Deco interiors were destroyed by explosives and/or flooded. Because there were too many poisonous jellyfish in the Sea of Japan, the final lifeboat scene was filmed in Santa Monica, California. [2] In his autobiography Straight Shooting, Robert Stack recalled, "No special effects for Andy [Stone]; he actually planned to destroy a liner and photograph the process. Thus began a film called The Last Voyage, which . . . for yours truly very nearly lived up to its title." [1] According to William H. Miller, American maritimehistorian, The French Line thereafter forbade any use of the ships they sold for scrap to be used for anything other than scrapping.
Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called the film "exciting" and noted "the tension is held unrelentingly until the very end." He added, "Well, almost the end. Let's be honest. Things do finally come to a point where a reasonably realistic viewer is likely to mutter, 'Oh, no!' That's the point where the water in the stateroom is rising above Miss Malone's chin and Mr. Stack, Edmond O'Brien and Woody Strode are still working frantically with an acetylene torch to cut her free. Then the obvious desperation of the problem and the questionable buoyancy of the ship lead one to have misgivings about the reasonableness of Mr. Stone. But up to this point of departure, we have to hand it to him; he has put together a picture that has drama, conviction and suspense. Using as his setting the old condemned liner Ile de France . . . he has got an extraordinary feeling of the actuality of being aboard a ship, the creeping terror of a disaster, the agony of a great vessel's death. And in all of his performers, especially Miss Malone, he has got a moving reflection of frenzy, futility and fear." [3]
The critic for Time called the film "the most violently overstimulating experience of the new year in cinema: an attempt by two shrewd shock merchants, Andrew and Virginia Stone . . . to give the mass audience a continuous, 91-minute injection of adrenaline . . . As a piece of professional entertainment, The Last Voyage is plainly superior to the picture it was patterned after, the British version of the loss of the Titanic. The script takes advantage of its fictional freedom, as the script of A Night to Remember could not, to focus its interest and excite its pace. The scenes of destruction are particularly explicit and dramatic . . . And yet, in its total effect, The Last Voyage lacks an element essential in all great disasters: dignity. Indeed, the idle depredation of a noble old ship, for the mere sake of salable sensation, may seem to some moviegoers an absolute indignity." [4]
