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Sick Product of a Sick System

Good movie but grossly overrated

As Good As It Gets

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This movie has some spectacular scenes but too much about it makes no sense.Why should the captain be so obcessed about making a record trip in a ship headed for the scrap heap? And all the things in the boiler room that were defective, no matter how old the ship was or what was its intended fate, passenger ships were carefully inspected before each voyage, No inspector would have failed to make sure something as critical as a steam gage or safety valve was working. That kind of thing was constantly checked.Nor would an engineer in charge have to worry about begging a higher up for taking action immediately.He would have immediately cut off the fuel oil supply to all boilers to reduce pressure until he had checked everything out.Nobody in this thing uses the least common sense.And as far as the woman trapped, the sensible thing,AGAIN" would be to round up some strong male passengers to help.get a heavy beam or oron bar to use as a lever, with something to use as shims to prevent the wall from falling back down as pressure was released.FIRST clearing all the depris out of the room so you could see what you were doing,you could have leavered the wall clear in a fraction of the time,far more quickly than bothering with the cutting torch,which could never have cleared things in the few minutes shown.At the time people regarded the trashing of the fine old liner as desecration to make this thing,It is a great pity that no one thought of preserving it as a hotel like the Queen Mary.

Quite good thriller, made independently but released by MGM, suggesting that writer-director Andrew Stone (and his wife Virginia, who edited, excellently) should be judged on the basis of more than "Song of Norway." Ship buffs will find it irresistible, as it offers a last look at the Ile de France, and sinks it, in the name of drama. It's a beautiful, stately liner, and Stone seems in able control of all the elements--the technical details, the drama, the scampering of terrified extras. Poor Dorothy Malone has to spend nearly the whole movie trapped in a dismantled stateroom, but she does a lot of acting with her face, and Robert Stack must have lost several pounds scrambling up and down decks as her panicked husband. There's also the pretty spectacular Woody Strode as the one crew member who doesn't ignore them, and good superciliousness from George Sanders, in Addison de Witt mode, as the captain. About the only technical error I can find is that the sky shots don't quite match--they're alternately sunny or gray depending on the day of the shoot. But it's a spectacular, creepy visualization of a calamity at sea, and it has more gravitas than the disaster movies that followed a decade or so later.

In their second teaming in 4 years (Ms. Malone & Mr. Stack had previously been paired on the WONDERFUL Douglas Sirk film WRITTEN ON THE WIND), Dorothy and Robert play husband and wife, traveling to Asia aboard the ill-fated S. S. Claridon ( a re-dressed Ile de France) along with their red-headed moppet.As fate would have it - the Claridon's boilers blow up - Ms. Malone's trapped by the rubble, and the ship's going down. Can Robert Stack save his wife? The big draw of this film was the actual destruction of the Ile de France as the S. S. Claridon. In this day and age, where we're so used to seeing things on huge scale being destroyed (the 'cousin' of THE LAST VOYAGE - TITANIC, was the first big budget film to rely HEAVILY on CGI for it's boat's destruction), it gives one a sense of the 'real,' knowing that while what your watching is staged - it IS REAL. This boat IS gonna go down (as is pointed out in the trivia area, after filming The France was re-floated and shipped off for scrap - sigh!).I'm a sucker for ANYTHING with Dorothy Malone. Any 'disaster' she's in - I'm there (I wish she was better acknowledged - especially given that Ms. Malone's STILL with us, thank goodness!). Given that this film is a 'disaster' flick before the Irwin Allen pictures of the early 70's (Earthquake,The Poseidon Adventure, et al.), this film is always a pleasure to watch, and given the large number of reviews posted the past day or so (it was just on TCM), I see I'm not alone.Grab the popcorn, and forget wearing a life-jacket - even though this ship's sinking - this film isn't.

Andrew and Virginia Stone, the husband and wife creative team who conceived and made the film The Last Voyage had the good fortune to use a real ocean liner in their film. No miniatures for their special effects which got The Last Voyage its only recognition from the Academy.That harbinger of bad luck named Murphy must have been on the passenger roster of the S.S. Claridon which was captained by George Sanders because the law he espoused was operating full tilt on this trans-Pacific voyage. It all starts with fire in the boiler room which leads to a series of bad luck and bad decisions. The story of the doomed ship Claridon proceeds on a double track. There is the story of the ship sinking itself and particularly the clash with Captain Sanders and Engineer Edmond O'Brien. The second is the personal story of Robert Stack who with wife Dorothy Malone and their little girl Tammy Marihugh are traveling to Tokyo for Stack's job. When an explosion occurs both Malone and the little girl are trapped in the cabin. With all that's going on around Stack finds precious little help for his family's personal plight.The Last Voyage is a tightly paced drama which does not waste a second of film frame in the telling of its story. Best in the film I think is Malone who is just brilliant as the woman coming to grips with an impending doom. Honorable mention should also go to Woody Strode who plays a ship's stoker who renders needed assistance to Stack in his hour of trial.The Last Voyage was nominated for Best Special Effects, but lost to the only other film nominated that year, George Pal's The Time Machine. I'd hated to have been an Academy voter that year and have to make that choice.Five years earlier the Andrea Doria disaster had happened only minutes from New York harbor. The stories from that sea disaster were fresh in the public mind, let alone the story of the Titanic.Fifty years after it was released The Last Voyage holds up well and even the technology changes haven't dated this film one bit. This one is highly recommended.