The Extraordinary Seaman

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.

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 .

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.

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."

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 ****