The Extraordinary Seaman

TCM recently ran the legendary EXTRAORDINARY SEAMAN with David Niven Alan Alda and Faye Dunaway, not to mention Mickey Rooney and a few other great character actors.

This is a really bad movie, not fun, just bad. The premise has Niven as a dead sea captain haunting a boat until he does a heroic act (Its WW2 and he's been dead since WW1). He's always in white and constantly drinking and never eats. Eventually he confesses his state to Alda who is a high strung CPA who can't figure out whats wrong with the Captain. Intercut with the funny footage is newsreel material cut mixed with witty lines and odd music. Its almost like MASH in some technical ways (the camp announcements say relating to the newsreel narration) but the effect is a stone faced silence. I kept going on with the film to see what was wrong, and its purely the fault of the direction which treats the material too realistically, and Alda who's patented shtick and mannerisms are completely wrong (think MASH at his silliest). How Alda survived this horrible miscasting amazes me, but then weirder things have happened.

Not quite one of the all time stinkers that the Medveds once dubbed it in their 50 Worst Films book, but its bad

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 fashionista presence in "The Thomas Crown Affair", and she projected a loose, warm personality in "Don Juan DeMarco". Here, in her younger years, she's a cool blonde shiver, calculating and aloof. The film, barely released by MGM, involves a group of military personnel circa World War II 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. Most of the actors look positively baffled. As for the placid Ms. Dunaway, she remains shockingly unruffled by the inane plot and the silly dialogue. NO STARS from ****

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, before there was the direct-to-video market, people who made howlingly bad films had just one way of mitigating the financial loss. That was to send bad movies to small towns where people would pay to see ANYTHING at a movie theater, because there was nothing else to do. (We're talking about the pre-cable, pre-VHS, just 6 channels on TV days, folks!)

This is how I came to see "The Extraordinary Seaman" in a double-bill with "Krakatoa East of Java" in Lancaster, California in 1969 when I was 13 years old. This has to rank as one of the most awful pairings of movies of all time.

It's funny, because for all that I can recall this movie as being incomprehensible, boring to the point of inducing numbness, and funny only in unintentional ways, Alan Alda stood out in it as the only bearable element. (I know Faye Dunaway and Mickey Rooney are credited in the movie, but I cannot for the life of me remember anything about what they did, which is probably a good thing.) This is not to say that his performance was good. It wasn't, that was impossible, this movie was so bad. This movie's most redeeming feature was that it inspired practically the whole theater to throw popcorn at the screen and to add an audience soundtrack of groans and hisses and boos and hoots, and that was fun.

What it left me with is an indelible memory of what a backwater Lancaster, California was in the days before the Antelope Valley Freeway was built: we were the kind of small town where bad films were sent to eke out a little revenue for the people involved. I think about that every time I see some direct-to-video movie in the rack at the supermarket check-out stand.

And I'm devoutly thankful for all the options we have now to avoid seeing movies like "The Extraordinary Seaman."

This movie has all the elements of a great movie, with a suspense ending. The Ever-Lasting Bottle of Scotch, was a wonderful touch and I for one would love to have a bottle just like that. This movie, though far-fetched, was a wonderful imaginative film, and usually the type that had not only comedy, imagination, but great acting as well. It looked like they were all having fun in the making of it, and I found it hilarious while watching it in Calgary Alta .

That's just about all you can say about this film that is so bad you simply have to gape in wonderment. Although just 80 minutes long, the film features an extraordinary amount of padding via moronic file footage of such events as Bess Truman trying unsuccessfully to break a bottle of champagne across an aircraft's nose. The plot has something to do with a ghost (David Niven)whose old scow of World War I vessel is discovered by some American sailors in the final days of World War II in the Pacific. The producers probably thought that with Alda, Rooney, Dunaway (just off her "Bonny and Clyde" fame, recall) and Frankenheimer helming the whole thing, it couldn't miss. Well, it did.