Dangerous Voyage

Beware not to confound this film with another one directed too by Vernon Sewell and titled "Ghost Ship", shot in 1952. It's also a sea mystery film.

When I started to watch this one, I first thought that I already saw it a long time ago...But I checked on IMDb and discovered that there were in fact two movies with approximately the same kind of topic.

In the first one, it's about a boat with no one aboard and the enigma around it; and in the latest, the rescue of two men in a row boat, and who mysteriously disappear just after...

The sequence where the two lead characters come into a police station, in France, to complain about someone who shot at them, and where two policemen don't understand what they say, is very amusing. Frenchies are shown as dumbs, but I laughed a lot.

The climax is quite effective. I would say unforgettable.

Some great and quirky pictures of Shoreham harbour in the 1950's but the film itself lacked energy, interest and tension. The first half of the film was pleasant enough, with a English brother and sister played respectively by Vincent Ball and Naomi Chance, who together with pulp fiction crime writer Peter Duncan, played by William Lundigan, endeavour to solve a mystery of an abandoned boat which they wish to buy. Their quest to discover the owners of the boat leads them to the local police, and then after a tip off, they set off for France. It's all very improbable, and despite the quaint scenes of small French fishing ports, the film meanders along without any real action or purpose. The film limps along as our threesome go from one location to another in their search to resolve the mystery, which in itself becomes a tiresome and dull exercise. Overall it's a pedestrian film with a low key ending. The film can only be recommended for the quaint 1950's quayside locations, but otherwise not much else of note to see.

Vernon Sewell had already shot 'Ghost Ship' on his steam yacht, and whipped up another script using it as the backdrop for this routine but lively and good-looking mystery shot on attractive coastal locations on both sides of the Channel, embellished with bright sunny weather, a score by Allan Gray ('A Matter of Life and Death', 'The African Queen'), the staggeringly cool and glamorous Naomi Chance (who has the blonde good looks and elegant dress sense of a model, but unfortunately also acts like one) and an ingenious 'McGuffin'.

I thought the first half of this film was very good, an intriguing story about a recovered boat, a degree of intrigue as those involved visit Paris, then it all goes a little wrong when they introduce nuclear burns bur gamma days, it does become somewhat muddled.

The acting is good, Naomi Chance is excellent as Joan, she looks incredibly stylish, a look that somehow looks wonderfully modern. Vincent Ball is also good as John, not an actor I've seen much of, memorable for being the gym instructor in Carry on Cruising. William Lundigan does well with the scripture was given.

It's decent, but so disjointed.

This starts out as a fairly standard boat thriller directed as usual by Vernon Sewell but then suddenly changes tack so that it is all about gamma rays and atomic bombs.The film is directed in rather plodding style.There is a coroners court sequence which goes on interminably. Then there is a comic scene in a French police station.Rather disappointing,I expected more.