The Extraordinary Seaman

The Extraordinary Seaman finds David Niven once again carrying the burden of a really botched film concept with his extraordinary charm. No actor was ever asked to work with less material than Niven did in his whole career.

The film is best described as a combination of The Ghost And Mrs. Muir, The Canterville Ghost and The African Queen all taking place in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Four American seaman Mickey Rooney, Jack Carter, Mana Tupou and their Lieutanant Alan Alda are on a life raft after their ship was sunk. They drift to a small island in the Phillipines and find a beached craft from the previous war with its captain David Niven who looks positively immaculate in his dress whites from the British Navy considering the heat and humidity of the tropics.

With a battery borrowed from plantation owner Faye Dunaway who would like some transport to Australia for her efforts, the American sailors set sail with Niven who will take them, providing he gets the opportunity to sink a Japanese warship. Trust me, Niven's got some really good reasons for wanting this so badly.

This dud of a film is a surprise coming from someone like John Frankenheimer who did such things as Birdman Of Alcatraz, The Train, Grand Prix, and Seven Days In May to name a few. Frankenheimer comes up so short in The Extraordinary Seaman as compared to those masterpieces and others. The situations are forced and labored and the comedy falls flat. Not enough use was made of Mickey Rooney and Jack Carter, both of them extraordinarily funny people.

But there's nothing extraordinary about 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

I can't recommend this movie however to get a better perspective I do recommend to one and all to read Alan Alda's comments regarding this disaster of a movie in his book, (NEVER HAVE YOUR DOG STUFFED and other things I've learned). In the chapter titled Yes to Everything he describes the chaos of making this movie and sums up by saying: "We finished the picture, and it was released directly into obscurity. I've heard that it played on an airplane over Pittsburgh, and I imagined people strapping on parachutes and jumping to get away from it." That last line made me laugh out loud, in fact many lines in this book will have you laughing aloud and enjoying his view on the world.

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.

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.