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Memorable, crazy movie

A Disappointing Continuation

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

John Frankenheimer's run of consecutive '60s classics comes to a rather undignified end with The Extraordinary Seaman, a universally panned flop that even the director himself couldn't defend. "The only movie I've made which I would say was a total disaster" was his somewhat honest verdict. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what goes wrong with this one – it's based on a decent story by Philip Rock, features an exceptionally talented cast and comes from a director on a winning streak. However, despite all this promise, the film emerges a hugely disappointing affair, lacking the necessary vitality and barely generating a smile during its entire running time.Shipwrecked in the Phillipines during WWII, four American seamen are desperate to find help before the Japanese invasion force arrives. Cook Oglethorpe (Mickey Rooney), gunner's mate Orville Toole (Jack Carter), silent giant Lightfoot Star (Manu Tupou) and their inexperienced senior office Lt. Morton Krim (Alan Alda) stumble across a rundown ship called the Curmudgeon, beached on a sandbank beside a river in the jungle. They board the ship and discover the only other person on board is eccentric British Navy captain John Finchhaven (David Niven), who claims that the ship belongs to him. Eventually they manage to refloat the vessel and set off toward the ocean, hoping to make for Australia. They also pick up a passenger in the attractive form of Jennifer Winslow (Faye Dunaway), a tough and resourceful trading post entrepreneur who wants out before the Japanese arrive. During their voyage, it becomes more and more obvious to the group that Captain Finchhaven is not at all what he seems. He drinks continually yet never gets drunk; he never sleeps; he never leaves the bridge; he doesn't even duck or dive for cover under enemy gunfire. Only later does the "ghostly" truth about Finchhaven become clear, as he reveals his whimsical past and the fact that he is cursed to roam the seas forever until he puts right an ancient wrong….Thankfully, The Extraordinary Seaman is at least brief with its nonsense. At a mere 80 minutes (a good 15 of which are taken up with stock newsreel footage) the film is over before it becomes an ordeal on the backside. It is, however, an ordeal on the intellect, with its intentionally absurd yet horribly flat narrative. Characters come and go without amounting to anything (Dunaway especially) and the story never seems to go anywhere. Alda tries hard in one of his earliest movie roles and Niven manages to convey his random eccentricities quite nicely, but there the positives end. The film's satirical edge is totally blunt, while the crude inter-cutting of newsreel footage, presumably to add 'comic irony', really doesn't work at all. There's a dispirited air hanging over the whole movie, as if everyone realised early on that they were involved in a disaster and decided to get it over with as quickly and indifferently as possible.

Despite the producers attempts to make a film with some semblance of a budget and cinemascope and bright, pretty colors, the film just seems to be an extraordinary cheat on all levels. Unlike "M*A*S*H," also from 1969 but from 20th Century Fox, "The Extraordinary Seaman" clearly uses stock newsreels as a cheap crutch and as a substitute for advancing action - and when that wasn't enough, they further padded its meager 80 minute running time by manipulating the footage. The attempt throughout to blur the line between newsreels and the film's own footage is clumsily handled. For contrast, try the way this same line was more deftly and more trippily blurred by Richard Lester in 1967's "How I Won the War" with John Lennon. As others here have observed, the breaking of this film into six named "parts" was a pointless exercise. Hell, it didn't work any better when "Frasier" did it on TV years later, did it? Major comedic talents - in particular Mickey Rooney and Jack Carter - are simply wasted in subservient roles, and are allowed to disappear before the film's ignominious conclusion. The casting of the secondary leads, Alda and Dunaway, was just really strange, considering that neither actor projects any kind of romantic vitality. (I would insert that Alda has clearly never developed as an actor, and from that day to this - and as many have observed - he just plays himself in role after role, and merely runs his lines without adding either depth or nuance to characterizations.) I'd say it was astounding how Paddy Chayefsky used Dunaway's reputation as an on screen ice-bitch to monumental advantage in 1976's "Network," with perhaps the most hilarious sex scene ever filmed: the one with William Holden in which she never stops yammering about work for a second. In "The Extraordinary Seaman," there's no clear reason why her character is even there. In fact, the only actor who projects any warmth or depth is David Niven, who makes it all look easy as befits a grand actor of his caliber. However, the role he makes look easy is itself a stupid cheat - a gimmick role that I feel most people in the audience would have figured out long before Alda's character did, due to their 1960's training with twist-ending TV shows such as "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits." Niven's ever-refilling bottle is the only decent throwaway gag in the entire proceedings, and thankfully John Frankenheimer displayed the judicious restraint to keep the gag from filling the center of the frame as a hack director might have. Alda's character made sure to point each! and! every! other! facet! of Niven's character's quirks to the audience... several times. Even his attempt at mutiny and his repeated man overboard gags are ineptly handled. As a further "goof," one reaction shot of Alda in full face (Part V or VI) is quite clearly reversed and is as painfully obvious as some shots of William Shatner you find in the miserable last year of "Star Trek" in which the same thing was repeatedly done. And by the way, didn't some of those overturned trees in the run-aground sequence look awfully fake? Before TCM ran this film, I had never even heard of it, and now it's clear I know why. It never should have been made.

I don't know, maybe it started with "The Americanization of Emily", a great movie which I loved then and still love except for the message. The message? That all wars and even WW II are wasteful, useless, stupid, dumb and that there is really not that much difference between them and us. In this case, "The Extraordinary Seaman", Alan Alda is prematurely playing the role of Hawkeye Pierce from "Mash". David Niven is a slightly loony ghost who believes in duty and honor. I guess that's why he's loony. In this farce (in the bad sense) the ghost is trying to do the right thing as he sees it while Alda knows he's wrong. Somehow, twenty-two years after the Greatest Generation saved the world for the rest of us ingrates, it became OK to poke fun at them and what they believed. They were apparently all Colonel Blimps.Somehow, The rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the real Bridge on the river Kwai and the notorious vivisection and germ warfare experiments conducted in Manchuria by the Japanese either went away or became lost in some crazy moral equivilency drug haze by the folks who brought us this trash. Yeah, we flattened their cities but after they started it. Freshman logic, if A then B.And yes, what a zinger of an ending, it was all for naught. I especially liked the chess game. A war just ended that took perhaps 50 million, yes that's million lives and our admirals and their admirals sit down for a game of chess. I wonder how Bull Halsey liked the movie? More than that, I really , really wonder how all those buddies of my father, who never came home in 1945 would have liked this movie? We don't deserve what those guys gave us.To anyone who actually enjoyed this thing, I recommend mandatory viewing of "The Cruel Sea" until they finally "get it".

Faye Dunaway may be many things, but 'fun' rarely comes to mind. She was seductively clever in Richard Lester's "Musketeers" pictures, she had a squirrelly fashion-queen presence in "The Thomas Crown Affair", and in these later years she has projected a looser, warmer presence (such as in "Barfly" or "Don Juan DeMarco"). But here she's an icy blonde shiver: too cool, too calculating, and too aloof. This film, barely released at all by MGM, involves a group of military personnel circa WWII who are stranded on an island in the Pacific, coming upon a mystical sea captain and his creaky barge. Separated--for no apparent reason--into SIX acts, and interspersed with actual newsreel footage from the period, one has to assume the final cut was taken out of director John Frankenheimer's hands and muddied up by outsiders. Most of the actors look positively baffled, except of course for Faye. She looks shockingly unruffled by the inane plot or the silly dialogue, so placid is her demeanor. "Fun away with Dunaway"?? Anything for publicity... NO STARS from ****