Le voyage des damnés

Goodish, and well-intentioned, but not great. Based on a true story, this should be a gut-wrenching emotional roller-coaster ride. The movie feels cold, empty and sterile, despite its subject matter. While we are given glimpses of the despicableness of the Nazi regime, the movie pulls its punches.

In place of genuine emotion, we have overwrought sub-plots, and an excess of sub-plots. This makes the movie overly long, without really adding to the drama. Some of the acting is in line with this overwroughtness, being over-acted, almost camp.

Not all the performances are so bad, though. Max von Sydow is excellent as the captain. Minor roles include a host of big names: Orson Welles, James Mason, Denholm Elliott, Katharine Ross, Jose Ferrer, Ben Gazzara.

Worth watching as a reminder of a dark period in human history, and the lengths of human bigotry.

This is a really remarkable film of great importance. It concerns the voyage of an ocean liner from Hamburg in Germany to Cuba, loaded with Jews who have bought their way out of the Nazi nightmare by paying money to Heinrich Himmler. The voyage across the Atlantic is long and slow, with much drama taking place on the way. But when the ship reaches Cuba, the Jews are not allowed to disembark after all, and the whole voyage turns out to have been a 'set-up', a cover for a military cargo arrangement. The film has an all-star cast of prominent film actors of the 1970s. There are so many of them it almost seems as if the whole of Hollywood tried to squeeze into the cast list. The stars include Faye Dunaway, Orson Welles, James Mason, Max von Sydow as the ship's captain, Jose Ferrer, Julie Harris, Oscar Werner in his last film, Maria Schell, Wendy Hiller (who is marvellous, as always), Sam Wanamaker, Ben Gazzara, and the list goes on. Some of these stars appear only fleetingly, between decks as it were, and others have real parts. Some like Orson Welles and Fernando Rey are even on land, and not at sea at all. (After all various diplomats in capital cities have to be seen debating whether to save the Jews or not, or the story would have no context.) Some of the younger stars of the day such as Katharine Ross, Lynne Frederick, and Malcolm McDowell are now largely forgotten as 'names', but were 'big' then. In his first feature film role, Jonathan Pryce is spectacular. Supporting actors like Lee Grant, Victor Spinetti and Luther Adler were familiar then but few now remember them at all, despite the many roles they played on countless occasions, so that everyone at least knew their faces. The film was directed by Stuart Rosenberg and was based on a best-selling novel, which in turn was based upon the notorious real events which actually happened and were an international scandal. The name of the ship was the S.S. St. Louis, and there were 937 Jewish passengers aboard. I cannot reveal the ending of the film or the fate of these passengers, but the historical remarks under 'Trivia' in the IMDb entry add information which partially corrects details of the facts as portrayed in the film.

Nazi atrocities hang over the heads of some 937 Jewish refugees who are allowed to board the S.S. St. Louis in Hamburg, Germany, bound for Havana in 1939, but corrupt Cuban dignitaries (and apathetic other countries) manage to find unjust legalities which prevent the ocean-liner from docking. Dramatized true account with a star-studded cast filling the roles of the passengers (professors, lawyers, teachers, one rabbi, a Nazi spy, at least two children, a Christian ship's captain, and Faye Dunaway, looking wonderfully turned-out as the wife of a frustrated doctor). With anti-Semitism making a wave through Havana, nobody there is anxious to take on the Jews (they are looked on as charity cases), but the personalities in these excursions are static at best, with Ben Gazzara playing a globe-trotting businessman attempting to bargain on behalf of the voyagers (he seems to come from a different film altogether). Produced (or, one may say, packaged) by '70s tycoon Sir Lew Grade, the proceedings verge on the edge of disaster-movie clichés (with the appearance and the pacing of a television mini-series). The material warrants attention, but the melodrama inherent in the situation continually falters--gummed up with ungainly issues, overdrawn hysteria (Sam Wanamaker's suicide attempt), flagrant sentiment (Katharine Ross' Havana prostitute), and thuggish violence (it's bad enough that the two male teachers--scrawny and with their heads shaved--have been through hell, this narrative gives them more of the same, which is about as entertaining as watching victims at a firing squad). Dunaway, coolly regal and ice-pack gorgeous, approaches her part like visiting royalty, and gives the film a little goose. **1/2 from ****

Usually, it seems like whenever a movie has a giant cast, then that's the movie's only strength. "Voyage of the Damned" did have more to it than simply its cast. Faye Dunaway, Oskar Werner, Orson Welles, Max Von Sydow, Jonathan Pryce, Malcolm McDowell, Lee Grant, James Mason, and a bunch of other big names star in this true story of a ship that left Nazi Germany bound for Cuba. The passengers were German Jews who believed that they were on their way to freedom in Cuba, but realized when they arrived that there was never any plan to set them free.

Maybe the cast does overshadow the plot, but it's still worth seeing. The movie is out of print, so you might have trouble finding it. Portland's Movie Madness has a copy, in case you ever come to Portland.

Despite the fact that this film had three Oscar nominations, and several Golden Globe nominations with one win (Katharine Ross), and a boatload of stars, it is not worth watching so much for it's quality (marginal) but for the story of how we knew what was happening to the Jews before World War II and did little to stop it.

This is the story of 937 Jews that were put on a boat to Havana with useless documents, as the German government had no intention of letting them off the ship. They were denied entry into Cuba, and the US also denied them entry before they finally were saved by a social service agency and allowed to land in Belgium. Of course, that would prove ultimately fatal for two-thirds of them as the war started just two months later.

Why would Germany do this? Simple. By sending a ship of Jews to the America's and having them turned away, they negated any right the US would have to complain when they started exterminating Jews. Clever of them, and our government fell right into their trap. Our support for Israel is not so much that we love the Jews, but a massive guilt for our participation in their extermination.

There were some great performances in this otherwise mediocre film: Lee Grant and Katherine Ross; some good performances: Ben Gazzara, Faye Dunaway; and the film debut of Jonathan Pryce (POTC 1. 2. & 3, Tomorrow Never Dies).

Check it out.