The Last Voyage | |
---|---|
Directed by | Andrew L. Stone |
Written by | Andrew L. Stone |
Produced by | Andrew L. Stone Virginia L. Stone |
Starring | Robert Stack Dorothy Malone George Sanders Edmond O'Brien |
Cinematography | Hal Mohr |
Edited by | Virginia L. Stone |
Music by | Rudy Schrager Uncredited: Andrew L. Stone Virginia L. Stone |
Production company | Andrew L. Stone Inc. [1] |
Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 91 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $1,370,000 [2] or $1 million [3] |
Box office | $2,060,000 [2] [4] |
The Last Voyage is a 1960 Metrocolor American disaster film starring Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, George Sanders, and Edmond O'Brien.
It was written and directed by Andrew L. Stone. [5] [6]
The film centers on the sinking of an aged ocean liner in the Pacific Ocean following an explosion in its boiler room.
The ship used in the film was the condemned French luxury liner SS Ile de France, which played a major role in rescue operations during the 1956 Andrea Doria disaster.
The SS Claridon is an aging transpacific ocean liner, scheduled to be scrapped after just a few more voyages. Cliff (Robert Stack) and Laurie Henderson (Dorothy Malone), and their daughter, Jill (Tammy Marihugh), are relocating to Tokyo and decide to sail there on board the ship. A fire in the boiler room is extinguished, but not before a boiler fuel supply valve is fused open. Before Chief Engineer Pringle (Jack Kruschen) can manually open a steam relief valve, a huge explosion rips through the boiler room, the many decks situated above it, and the side of the ship. Pringle and a number of passengers are killed, and Laurie is trapped under a steel beam in their cabin.
Cliff runs back there and can't get Laurie out alone. He then finds Jill trapped on the other side of the big hole left by the explosion. He tries to use a shattered piece of the bed to get to the other side, but it falls through the hole. Third Officer Osborne believes that the crew should start loading the passengers into the lifeboats, but Captain Robert Adams (George Sanders) is reluctant, as he never lost a ship. Cliff rescues Jill by placing a board for her to crawl across the hole on. Down in the boiler room, Second Engineer Walsh (Edmond O'Brien) reports to Captain Adams that a seam to the bulkhead has broken away. Cliff tries to get a steward's help, but to no avail. A passenger states that he overheard his conversation and wants to help.
Osborne (George Furness) reports that the boiler room is now half full. The ship then begins to transmit an SOS, on orders of Captain Adams. Cliff and a few other men return to his cabin to try to help free Laurie but find that they need a cutting torch. The carpenter reports to the crew that the boiler room is now two-thirds full. Captain Adams makes an announcement to the passengers to put on their life jackets, and soon after reluctantly orders the crew to begin loading and launching the lifeboats.
Cliff finds a torch and tries to rush back to Laurie with the help of crewman Hank Lawson (Woody Strode), but they still need an acetylene tank. On instruction from Cliff, Lawson puts Jill in a lifeboat and asks them to return with an acetylene tank. The bulkhead between the boiler room and the engine finally gives way, causing the ship to sink lower. On top of that, a second explosion occurs in the cargo hold, blowing off the cargo hatch on the bow of the ship.
Captain Adams is looking at his promotion letter to commodore of the line while Laurie holds a piece of a shattered mirror in her hand, contemplating suicide to free Cliff from risking his life to save her. She chooses not to do so and tosses it away.
When Cliff and Lawson continue to search for a way to rescue Laurie, even recruiting Walsh's help, though the latter believes nothing can be done. Captain Adams returns to his office to retrieve the ship's logbook and papers but is killed when the forward smokestack falls on him. Meanwhile, a lifeboat returns with the acetylene tank and the group gets Laurie out from under the steel beam. Water pours into the open cargo hatch, and the ship begins its final plunge. They get up to the boat deck along with Osborne and Ragland. As they proceed to the stern where a lifeboat is standing by, Walsh jumps off the ship and swims away from it. Cliff, Laurie, Osborne, Ragland, and Lawson jump into the water and find a lifeboat just as the ship sinks. Cliff personally helps Lawson aboard, in thanks for his devotion to assisting Laurie's rescue, and the narrator concludes with, "This was the death of the steamship Claridon. This was her last voyage."
Stuart Whitman was originally announced for the male lead, and Sidney Poitier for the role of Hank Lawson. [7] [8]
The film originally was scheduled to be shot in CinemaScope off the coast of England, but instead it was filmed almost entirely in the Inland Sea off the coast of Osaka causing noticeable consistency conflicts in the film. For example in the beginning of the film all of the shipboard extras are of European origin however as the ship begins to sink,(and the outdoor filming moves to Inland Sea) a majority of the shipboard guests (extras) become Asian in origin (this is most notable in the obvious attempt to have the extras avert their faces from the camera).
The ship used in the film was the French luxury liner SS Ile de France, which had been in service from 1927 until 1959, when it was sold to a Japanese scrapyard. [9] [10] Its former owners initially attempted to block Stone's rental of it (for $1.5 million), [11] but withdrew their opposition when MGM agreed not to identify it by its original name when publicizing the film. [12] [13] [14] It was towed to shallow waters, where jets of water shot onto it from fire boats [11] flooded forward compartments and made it appear that it was sinking by the bow. The forward funnel was sent crashing into the deckhouse and the Art Deco interiors were destroyed by explosives and/or flooded. Because of the poisonous jellyfish in the Inland Sea, the final lifeboat scene was filmed in Santa Monica, California. [12]
In his autobiography Straight Shooting, Robert Stack recalled, "No special effects for Andy [Stone]; he actually planned to destroy a liner and photograph the process. Thus began a film called The Last Voyage, which...for yours truly very nearly lived up to its title." [11] According to William H. Miller, American maritime historian, The French Line thereafter forbade any use of the ships they sold for scrap to be used for anything other than scrapping. After the film was finished, Japanese scrappers raised the ship and towed it to their scrapyard. [15]
The film marked the third and final pairing of Stack and Dorothy Malone. They had previously costarred in the Douglas Sirk films Written on the Wind (1956) and The Tarnished Angels (1958).
According to MGM records the film earned $1,060,000 in the US and Canada and $1 million elsewhere resulting in a $551,000 loss. [2] [16]
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film "exciting" and noted "the tension is held unrelentingly until the very end." He added, "Well, almost the end. Let's be honest. Things do finally come to a point where a reasonably realistic viewer is likely to mutter, 'Oh, no!' That's the point where the water in the stateroom is rising above Miss Malone's chin and Mr. Stack, Edmond O'Brien and Woody Strode are still working frantically with an acetylene tank to cut her free. Then the obvious desperation of the problem and the questionable buoyancy of the ship lead one to have misgivings about the reasonableness of Mr. Stone. But up to this point of departure, we have to hand it to him; he has put together a picture that has drama, conviction and suspense. Using as his setting the old condemned liner Ile de France...he has got an extraordinary feeling of the actuality of being aboard a ship, the creeping terror of a disaster, the agony of a great vessel's death. And in all of his performers, especially Miss Malone, he has got a moving reflection of frenzy, futility and fear." [17]
The critic for Time called the film "the most violently overstimulating experience of the new year in cinema: an attempt by two shrewd shock merchants, Andrew and Virginia Stone...to give the mass audience a continuous, 91-minute injection of adrenaline. As a piece of professional entertainment, The Last Voyage is plainly superior to the picture it was patterned after, the British version of the loss of the Titanic . The script takes advantage of its fictional freedom, as the script of A Night to Remember could not, to focus its interest and excite its pace. The scenes of destruction are particularly explicit and dramatic. And yet, in its total effect, The Last Voyage lacks an element essential in all great disasters: dignity. Indeed, the idle depredation of a noble old ship, for the mere sake of salable sensation, may seem to some moviegoers an absolute indignity." [18]
Augie Lohman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German military transport ship which was sunk on 30 January 1945 by Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea while evacuating civilians and military personnel from East Prussia and the German-occupied Baltic states, and German military personnel from Gotenhafen (Gdynia), as the Red Army advanced. By one estimate, 9,400 people died, making it the largest loss of life in a single ship sinking in history.
RMS Olympic was a British ocean liner and the lead ship of the White Star Line's trio of Olympic-class liners. Olympic had a career spanning 24 years from 1911 to 1935, in contrast to her short-lived sister ships, Titanic and Britannic. This included service as a troopship during the First World War, which gained her the nickname "Old Reliable", and during which she rammed and sank the U-boat U-103. She returned to civilian service after the war, and served successfully as an ocean liner throughout the 1920s and into the first half of the 1930s, although increased competition, and the slump in trade during the Great Depression after 1930, made her operation increasingly unprofitable. Olympic was withdrawn from service and sold for scrap on 12 April 1935 which was completed in 1937.
HMHSBritannic was the third and final vessel of the White Star Line's Olympic class of steamships and the second White Star ship to bear the name Britannic. She was the youngest sister of the RMS Olympic and the RMS Titanic and was intended to enter service as a transatlantic passenger liner. She was operated as a hospital ship from 1915 until her sinking near the Greek island of Kea, in the Aegean Sea, in November 1916. At the time she was the largest hospital ship in the world.
An ocean liner is a type of passenger ship primarily used for transportation across seas or oceans. Ocean liners may also carry cargo or mail, and may sometimes be used for other purposes. The Queen Mary 2 is the only ocean liner still in service to this day.
SS Andrea Doria was a luxury transatlantic ocean liner of the Italian Line, put into service in 1953. She is widely known from the extensive media coverage of her sinking in 1956, which included the remarkably successful rescue of 1,660 of her 1,706 passengers and crew.
RMS Aquitania was an ocean liner of the Cunard Line in service from 1914 to 1950. She was designed by Leonard Peskett and built by John Brown & Company in Clydebank, Scotland. She was launched on 21 April 1913 and sailed on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York on 30 May 1914. She was given the title of Royal Mail Ship (RMS) like many other Cunard ocean liners since she carried the royal mail on many of her voyages. Aquitania was the third in Cunard Line's grand trio of express liners, preceded by RMS Mauretania and RMS Lusitania, and was the last surviving four-funnelled ocean liner. Shortly after Aquitania entered service, the First World War broke out, during which she was first converted into an auxiliary cruiser before being used as a troop transport and a hospital ship, notably as part of the Dardanelles Campaign.
RMS Oceanic was a transatlantic ocean liner built for the White Star Line. She sailed on her maiden voyage on 6 September 1899 and was the largest ship in the world until 1901. At the outbreak of World War I she was converted into an armed merchant cruiser. On 8 August 1914 she was commissioned into Royal Navy service.
HMS Otranto was an armed merchant cruiser requisitioned by the British Admiralty when World War I began in 1914. Built before the war for the UK–Australia run as SS Otranto, she was primarily used in the war to search for German commerce raiders. She played small roles in the Battle of Coronel in November 1914 when the German East Asia Squadron destroyed the British squadron searching for it and in the Battle of the Falkland Islands the following month when a British squadron annihilated the Germans in turn.
SS Imperator was a German ocean liner built for the Hamburg America Line, launched in 1912. At the time of her completion in June 1913, she was the largest passenger ship in the world, surpassing the new White Star liner Olympic.
SS France was a Compagnie Générale Transatlantique ocean liner, constructed by the Chantiers de l'Atlantique shipyard at Saint-Nazaire, France, and put into service in February 1962. At the time of her construction in 1960, the 316 m (1,037 ft) vessel was the longest passenger ship ever built, a record that remained unchallenged until the construction of the 345 m (1,132 ft) RMS Queen Mary 2 in 2004.
SS Île de France was a French luxury ocean liner that plied the prestigious transatlantic route between Europe and New York from 1927 through to 1958. She was built in Saint-Nazaire for the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, and named after the region around Paris known as "L'Ile de France". Launched in 1926, she commenced her maiden voyage on June 22, 1927, as the first major ocean liner built after World War I, and the first ever to be decorated almost entirely in modern Art Deco style. Though she was neither the largest ship nor the fastest, she was considered the most beautifully decorated built by CGT, becoming the favored ship of the pre-World War II era among the young, wealthy and fashionable elites.
SS Nomadic is a former tender of the White Star Line, launched on 25 April 1911 at Belfast, that is now on display in Belfast's Titanic Quarter. She was built to transfer passengers and mail to and from the ocean liners RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic. She is the only surviving vessel designed by Thomas Andrews, who also helped design those two ocean liners, and the last White Star Line vessel in existence today.
SS L'Atlantique was a French liner owned by the Compagnie de Navigation Sud-Atlantique, a subsidiary of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT). When completed in 1931 she was the most biggest, swiftest and most luxurious liner on the route between Europe and South America.
RMS Titanic sank on 15 April 1912 in the North Atlantic Ocean. The largest ocean liner in service at the time, Titanic was four days into her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, with an estimated 2,224 people on board when she struck an iceberg at 23:40 on 14 April. Her sinking two hours and forty minutes later at 02:20 ship's time on 15 April resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 people, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.
The Olympic-class ocean liners were a trio of British ocean liners built by the Harland & Wolff shipyard for the White Star Line during the early 20th century, named Olympic (1911), Titanic (1912) and Britannic (1914). All three were designated to be the largest as well as most luxurious liners of the era, devised to provide White Star an advantage as regards to size and luxury in the transatlantic passenger trade.
The crew of the Titanic were among the estimated 2,240 people who sailed on the maiden voyage of the second of the White Star Line's Olympic-class ocean liners, from Southampton, England, to New York City in the United States. Halfway through the voyage, the ship struck an iceberg and sank in the early morning of 15 April 1912, resulting in the deaths of over 1,500 people, including approximately 688 crew members.
RMS Titanic was a British ocean liner that sank on 15 April 1912 as a result of striking an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, United States. Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard, approximately 1,500 died, making the incident one of the deadliest peacetime sinkings of a single ship. Titanic, operated by the White Star Line, carried some of the wealthiest people in the world, as well as hundreds of emigrants from the British Isles, Scandinavia, and elsewhere in Europe who were seeking a new life in the United States and Canada. The disaster drew public attention, spurred major changes in maritime safety regulations, and inspired a lasting legacy in popular culture.
HMS Hilary was a Booth Line passenger steamship that was built in Scotland in 1908 and operated scheduled services between Liverpool and Brazil until 1914. In the First World War she was an armed merchant cruiser (AMC) until a U-boat sank her in the Atlantic Ocean in 1917.
Titanic II is a 2010 American drama disaster film written, directed by and starring Shane Van Dyke and distributed by The Asylum. Despite the title, it is not a sequel to the 1997 critically acclaimed film, but is a mockbuster of it. The film is set on a fictional replica Titanic that sets off exactly 100 years after the original ship's maiden voyage to perform the reverse route, but global warming and the forces of nature cause history to repeat itself on the same night, only on a more disastrous and deadly scale.
The RMS Lusitania was a British-registered ocean liner that was torpedoed by an Imperial German Navy U-boat during the First World War on 7 May 1915, about 11 nautical miles off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland. The attack took place in the declared maritime war-zone around the UK, three months after unrestricted submarine warfare against the ships of the United Kingdom had been announced by Germany following the Allied powers' implementation of a naval blockade against it and the other Central Powers.