O Navio Condenado

The Wreck of the Mary Deare was the next to last film of Gary Cooper and it pairs him with Charlton Heston who was fresh off his Oscar from Ben-Hur. Between the two of them they were the heroes of six sound Cecil B. DeMille films. And this film does have some special effects old C.B. DeMille might have enjoyed.

Salvage tug captain Charlton Heston based in the UK comes across an abandoned freighter named the Mary Deare. Only Gary Cooper, sporting a head injury, and acting very mysterious is on the vessel. When raging seas prevent Heston from reboarding his ship, Cooper saves his life by hauling Heston on board when he can't hold on to the rope.

In the meantime Cooper completes his objective which was to beach the ship on a series of jagged rocks in the English Channel named the Minquieries. He's doing this because he suspects skullduggery from the crew and the late captain of the Mary Deare.

Americans Cooper and Heston are given good support by a cast of players from the UK such as Emlyn Williams, Michael Redgrave, Alexander Knox, and Mary Ure. The villain of the piece is second officer Richard Harris in one of his early and acclaimed parts before he became a star.

The Minquiries have a lot of legend about them. They are the top of an Atlantic based plateau. None of them are big enough to rate being called an island. Smugglers and pirates in centuries passed piled many a ship on them and looted the contents. Today the only thing on them are small fishing huts. They are a well known hazard to navigation.

The scenes involving the wrecking and salvage of the ship are well done. Many years ago I saw a picture of MGM's special effects man Buddy Gillespie inside the tank with the model of the Mary Deare. It was an interesting insight into the special effects game on the high seas.

Fans of both Cooper and Heston will like this film. I suspect C.B. DeMille regretted not having a chance to direct his two favorite leading men in a joint project.

"The Wreck of the Mary Deare" is a British film, made by a British director, based upon a novel by a British writer (Hammond Innes), mostly set either in Britain or aboard a ship in the English Channel, and with a predominantly British cast. And yet it stars two major American actors, Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston. The reason, apparently, is that Alfred Hitchcock was originally slated to direct the movie, but pulled out, claiming that the novel couldn't be filmed without turning the story into "a boring courtroom drama." (Hitchcock was fascinated by crime, especially the psychology of crime, but the criminal justice process, whether it involved police work or the courtroom procedure, held little interest for him). The task of directing the film eventually went to another British director, Michael Anderson.

The film's central theme, however, is a characteristically Hitchcockian one- the fight of a man wrongly accused to clear his name. The man in question is Gideon Patch, an American-born sea captain with the British Merchant Navy, who is accused of incompetence after his crew mutiny and abandon ship, leaving the vessel to sink; Patch alone remains on board desperately trying to save the ship. The structure of the film owes something to that of "The Caine Mutiny" from a few years earlier in that the action begins at sea and then moves to a court hearing on land. This film, however, begins in medias res when a salvage man, John Sands, boards the stricken and apparently abandoned "Mary Deare" in the middle of a storm only to find that Captain Patch is still on board. We never actually see the mutiny or the earlier part of the voyage, even in flashback, but hear about them later, both in the conversations between Patch and Sands and at the subsequent court of inquiry into the loss of the vessel. In order to clear his name, Patch needs to prove that the ship was sabotaged and the mutiny arranged by the owners as part of an insurance fraud.

This was to be Gary Cooper's penultimate film- his last, "The Naked Edge" from two years later was also directed by Anderson- and he gives a fine performance. When we first see Patch on board the stricken vessel he first seems dangerously obsessive, perhaps even mad, but we later come to realise that he is one of the few men of integrity in this film. He receives good support from Charlton Heston as Sands. By 1959 Heston was a huge star- this was also the year of "Ben-Hur"- but he occasionally agreed to appear in supporting roles to work with a director or co-star he particularly admired. (For example, he had taken a fairly minor role in "The Big Country" just for the experience of working with William Wyler). There is also a good contribution from a young, per-stardom Richard Harris as Higgins, the ringleader of the mutineers.

Anderson was something of an uneven director. He is most famous for having made "The Dam Busters", one of the most beloved of all British war films, but he also has some fairly second-rate entries on his CV, such as "Logan's Run" and "Orca" (which also starred Harris). "The Wreck of the Mary Deare" is also in some ways an uneven film. In one respect Hitchcock was correct; the courtroom scenes are not very interesting. Cecil Parker as the Chairman of the Inquiry is particularly dull. The main interest lies in the action sequences, particularly those near the beginning in which Patch and Sands are desperately trying to save both the storm-battered ship and their own lives. Although the film was made more than fifty years ago, the special effects are very well done and these sequences remain thrilling even today. The look of the film, shot in a muted palette dominated by greys, browns and greens, also seems appropriate to the film's theme of dark deeds and conspiracies.

It would have been interesting to see how Hitchcock might have treated the story. His film would probably have been very different from Anderson's, but in one respect I am glad he never got to make it. After dropping out of this film he moved onto a new project which eventually became "North by Northwest", one of his greatest achievements. 7/10

Anyone connected to the sea or anyone who just likes a good sea story is going to love this movie. This movie isn't Ben Hur or High Noon nor does it try to be, but this is still a very worthwhile movie. The opening scenes of this film set it's mysterious and eerie tempo, almost a film nourish character that carries the viewer through the movie. I particularly enjoyed the scenes depicting the ship itself and found them to be more realistic and believable and better shot than almost any other movie of the genre. I can only hope that one day this long forgotten film with be rediscovered and find a new audience in a DVD version.

This movie certainly could have used a re-write on the script. While the main theme of the movie is wonderful, all the little pieces that make up the lot just don't add up together. Repeatedly, Gary Cooper's character does things that just don't make a lot of sense. And, for the most part, Charlton Heston just goes along with him--even though much of the time Cooper's character seems like a bit of a nutter! For these flaws, the film's rating goes down to 7.

So, how does the film STILL merit a good score overall? Well, the plot is very unusual and makes a lot of sense once all the pieces are put together. In other words, although there are SOME disparate and inconsistent elements in the plot, it is all tied together wonderfully at the end--like a really good mystery. See it also because it's one of Cooper's last films and he generally did a fine job (aside from occasionally seeming nuts).

I realize that great special effects shouldn't make or break a movie, and they don't here, but they ARE really terrific. The shipwreck scenes in the beginning of the film are not only great for 1958, they're great by today's standards too. I'd love to see a making of documentary. I'm so bored with the special effects "making of" docs of today. It's always that everything was first shot against a green screen, and then come the interviews with the SPX guys telling you what they did and how hard it was to do. "Yep, we just programmed the computer and went for coffee while it rendered the action". Yeah, really impressive. No computer here. This is the true essence of what used to be a CRAFT. Albeit scaled down, everything you see here on the screen actually existed in real life and not in cyberspace. I don't know if anyone will ever read this, or even care to compare, but watch the similar ship scenes in the newer version of King Kong and then compare them to what was done here almost 50 years sooner. IMHO, the scenes in the 2005 "King Kong" look more like a very realistic cartoon! Same thing with this years "Flyboys". The dogfights had a lot of great "camera" angles and thrilling sequences, but nowhere near as thrilling as done almost 80 years before for "Wings". And besides, that cartoon look clashes with the live action stuff. Yes, NOT using a computer WOULD have made things harder for the "Flyboys" and "Kong" crews, but if they're really any good they would have come up with better results! That's why the director of "The Fugitive" crashed a REAL train for the film rather than stoke up the computer chips. You really want real, you have to have real in there someplace! I really think that the film industry has it backwards. Huge budget films should spend all that money on the harder to do but more satisfying "hand crafted" SFX and leave the computer generated junk for the low budget flicks.