Le voyage des damnés

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.

Based on a true story. In 1939, 1937 German-Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany are bound for Cuba and asylum. Before reaching Cuba the ship is refused permission to dock and all visas revoked. After being told they could not dock anywhere else, the S.S. St. Louis must turn around and head back to Germany and certain death for its passengers. The captain(Max von Sydow)wants to fake a shipwreck off the coast of England, but another solution arises.

A tremendous all-star cast features:Faye Dunaway, Oskar Werner, Lee Grant, Jose Ferrer, Katherine Ross, Orson Welles, Lynne Frederick, Ben Gazzara, James Mason, Victor Spinetti and Malcolm McDowell. I was most impressed with Ross and Frederick. This film can bring on mild depression, but hope does win out in the end. I liked the finale showing important characters and their fate.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing--but nobody seemed to realize this when overloading the ship with star names and then giving them little to do. Although based on a true incident, VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED gives the subject a sprawling Hollywood treatment and does what "Ship of Fools" did to Katherine Anne Porter's intriguing novel.

At least MAX VON SYDOW gets to be dynamic as the captain and has the appropriate amount of star footage, but others--like JAMES MASON, JULIE HARRIS and WENDY HILLER--are gone before they can do much.

However, the film's chief fault is the running time--well over two hours without ever building up the tension when the fate of the passengers should be pumping up audience interest in the outcome. The story takes a dramatic turn when the Jewish passengers are denied entry into Cuba and must return to their homeland unless the captain can come up with a better plan.

FAYE DUNAWAY makes a stunning impression and LEE GRANT got an Oscar nomination for her strong supporting role, but others in the large cast come and go in an indifferent manner--except for OSKAR WERNER, who seems to be doing a repeat of his role in "Ship of Fools" as the ship's doctor and is as earnest as ever.

Too bad the storyline couldn't have been trimmed to give the film a tighter length. As it is, it just seems to make its point of man's inhumanity to man without subtlety.

Just misses being a more significant film.

This is a very down to earth film about German Jews who were kicked out of Hamburg, Germany and were placed on a ship called the S/S St. Louis headed to Havana, Cuba. This ship carried 937 passengers, some children and Jewish people with all kinds of backgrounds, even prisoners from concentration camps who were teachers. The Nazi movement was showing great Anti-Semitism during the Year 1939 before World War II started. Faye Dunaway, (Denise Kreisler) gave an outstanding performance as a very pretty, rich, sexy wife of Dr. Egan Kreisler, (Oskar Werner). There is a young man who works on the ship and is a German and he falls in love with a very pretty Jewish girl and they become very close together and had to make some horrible decisions. Great film which tells the true story of what happened to most of the people who were on board this horrible cruise of Nazi Germany.

...as the studio had floated this one as their big Oscar-bait of the year before it pretty much dropped off the face of the earth, and it's easy to see why--For the first hour, in the story of a thousand 1939 German refugees relocated to Cuba as a propaganda stunt, we get so many of the standard "Wartime passengers of destiny" subplots, those who didn't know their history would think it was a rewritten Titanic epic, and the ship was going to sink. The story, of course, is that a corrupt, bureaucratic Cuba didn't want them, a 30's isolationist US wouldn't take them, and the doomed passengers might ultimately be sent back to Germany. That should be drama but it's oddly uninvolving--Compared to the less realistic Wartime Passengers of Destiny in Robert Wise's The Hindenburg that same year, that one had a better feel for prewar tensions hiding in luxury class..."Hindenburg" made you dream of traveling on luxury zeppelin, "Voyage" just makes you feel like you're on a long trip with a rude staff.

Director Stuart Rosenberg plays the Jewish-history angle too subjectively, since he acts as if the audience is already on his side from the beginning, like "Schindler's List Goes to Havana". 70's-era Faye Dunaway plays her usual ruthless hysterics, Max Von Sydow is the sympathetic ship captain, and Ben Gazzara gets the noble speeches as the government representative, but most of it falls apart in the over-the-top climaxes. Malcolm McDowell looks a bit confused at having to play a good character as a teen steward who finds romance (when he helps foil a German-intelligence ploy, watch the Alex deLarge bad-boy come back out again) . Orson Welles shows up as a Cuban bureaucrat, but with his strange 70's-Welles delivery, you're genuinely not sure whether he's trying for "casual raconteur", or whether he's befuddled by his own lines because he was at the career point where he couldn't remember them anymore.