Alternative-3 (1977)

When the latest broadcast of the investigative TV program Science Report begins, the scholarly host, Tim Brinton, who kinda looks like Isaac Asimov's long lost brother, fills the viewer in on the topic for this week's episode:

Mounting suspicions and suppositions on the current and alarming brain-drain Great Britain has been suffering lately, due to an abnormal spike in the untimely deaths or inexplicable disappearances of many prominent (and not so prominent) physicists, engineers, agronomists, astronomers, and others in related scientific fields.

Things then take on a sinister twinge when the program shifts focus from distraught family members of the dead and missing to a Professor Ballantine, who "nervously" delivered a videotape to a colleague before he died in an "accident." But the tape appears to be blank, showing nothing but static.

However, the investigative team of Science Report (Brinton, Munroe, Hazell) realizes the tape is encrypted and must be descrambled first. And while that is being processed, the investigation continues, which uncovers a huge conspiracy between the Superpowers that dates back to the late 1950s, which has now accelerated due to the converging factors of an unchecked population explosion and an imminent environmental collapse due to pollutants and dwindling / exhausted natural resources; meaning the Earth's ability to support life has been irrevocably compromised, and an alternative means was needed to maintain the species.

Seeking answers, the team tracks down Dr. Carl Gerstein (Manner), who predicted this crisis way back in 1957 and offered three possible solutions: 

The first solution was a drastic reduction in population by dubious means; second, a series of vast underground bunkers to be populated by those best suited to rebuild once the environmental crisis had passed; and alternative three involved abandoning the Earth altogether by establishing a colony of essential personnel on Mars with the moon as a way station in between -- a plan that already appears to be in motion.

Several uncovered documents reveal the United States and the Soviet Union's space programs were far more advanced than public perception and had landed on the moon long before 1969. They even manage to get testimony of an eye-witness, Bob Grodin (Rimmer), a disgraced former Apollo astronaut, who was written off as a loony when he brought home tales of a secret base spotted on the dark side of the moon.

So, yep, that's right. All those scientists and engineers who disappeared are no longer on the planet. And those that died were either involved in a staged death so they could leave with no questions asked or were bumped off to keep things a secret when they refused to go.

And after several other leads and informants are chemically lobotomized or disappear without a trace, the episode ends with a bombshell: Ballantine's descrambled footage showing a successful joint NASA / RFSA manned landing on Mars in 1962, where something appears to have already beaten them there -- or has been there all along... 

Back in October of 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater caused a huge case of the drizzles when many folks tuning in late failed to realize his Halloween treat of an updated version of War of the Worlds as a series of contemporary news bulletins was also a trick, with many listeners believing a real alien invasion had begun in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, and still serves as a landmark case study in blind panic and mass hysteria.

Later, in July of 1950, Dimension X, an anthology radio program that "offered a variety of exciting tales of future technology, with a special focus on space exploration (-- including alien invasion), which often reflected contemporary anxieties about the dangers of technology" broadcasted an episode called The Man in the Moon. Here, a Federal investigator unravels a series of transmissions from someone, a scientist, claiming that he and many others have been kidnapped and are currently being held on the moon by a cabal of Nazis who secretly colonized the moon in the late 1930s, who are now prepping to invade the Earth!

The Grand Island Independent (November 2, 1938).

Both of those radio broadcasts seem to have influenced David Ambrose and Christopher Miles' Alternative-3 (1977), which was written and conceived as an elaborate April Fools Day prank.

Apparently, there really was a news serial called Science Report on the Norwich-based ITV Anglia, and this hoax was conceived and written to fit into that show's investigative format to give it more credibility and a verisimilitude punch-up like Welles' fake news broadcast.

However, due to a labor strike, the production blew its broadcast date of April 1st and the program was then finally aired in late June. And despite the original host (Brinton) being the only non-actor in the show, confirmed by the closing credits (-- which also show Brian Eno provided the soundtrack), the broadcasters were soon swamped with calls by those duped and concerned citizens, demanding to know how much time they had until the world ended and how to get a ticket to Mars to see whatever the hell that was scrabbling in the dirt.

Like with Welles’ broadcast, Alternative-3 triggered widespread panic and outrage in the public and the media against ITV Anglia, who apologized and banned the episode from ever being rebroadcasted, which means trying to see it can be a bit of a chore.

When I finally tracked it down on YouTube, the poor video quality and shoddy audio actually ads another layer of pseudo-realism to the fake credibility connived by Ambrose and Miles, who do a pretty good job of adding layer upon layer of fidgety interviewees, hidden camera footage, and a series of outlandish facts with just enough plausibility to give the narrative more juice -- topped off with a pretty effective staged Mars landing that I'm sure was shot in the same rock quarry as that one episode of Doctor Who. (Which one? All of them.)

Anyhoo, I know it sucked me in pretty good as it played out, but then this spell was completely shattered when Shane Rimmer showed up as the kooky ex-astronaut, whose familiar mug can be seen in a couple of James Bond entries -- most notably, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). His performance was fine, mind you, he was just too familiar a face and short-circuited the whole thing for me.

So, yeah, Alternative-3 is a load of horse-puckey -- a very well staged, effectively executed, and highly entertaining load of horse-puckey, but horse-puckey all the same -- like another notorious TV broadcast, UPN’s Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (1998).

Despite all the non-proof being proved false or non-existent, to this very day some folks hold onto the notion that what was featured in Alternative 3 was real and is really happening -- there's even a "whistle-blowing" novel written to cash in on this bogus conspiracy, proving once again P.T. Barnum was right all along. It also fits in perfectly with my own pet theory: conspiracy is the new opiate of the masses.

And with such an intensive backlash, it would be nearly 15 years before any broadcaster in Great Britain would be brave enough to try something like this again. But Ghostwatch (1992) proved even more successful at duping the audience into believing it was all real and caused even more of a public shit-storm than Alternative-3 did. But that, Fellow Programs, is another tale for another day. 

Originally posted on July 25, 2016, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

Alternative-3 (1977) Anglia Television / EP: John Woolf / P: John Rosenberg / AP: Bob Bell / D: Christopher Miles / W: David Ambrose, Christopher Miles / C: Richard Crafter, Ian Craig / E: Michael O'Halloran / M: Brian Eno / S: Tim Brinton, Gregory Munroe, Carol Hazell, Shane Rimmer, Richard Marner

The Last Voyage (1960)

"The SS Claridon, a proud ship, a venerable ship, but as ships go, an old ship -- a very old ship,” intones or wary narrator, greeting the audience with a history lesson of the vessel we are currently observing as it peacefully chugs along. But looks, as the old saying goes, can be deceiving.

“For 38 years she's weathered everything the elements could throw at her: typhoons, zero-zero fogs, the scorching heat of the tropics. Now she is scheduled for only five more crossings. Then a new ship, a posh, streamlined beauty, will take her place. It is then that the Claridon will pass into oblivion. She has an appointment with the scrapyard. But it's an appointment she'll never keep. For this is her last voyage.”

Now, the ‘last voyage’ this narrator so ominously intones begins mid-journey, somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And then, barely a minute into the film, disaster strikes when a fire breaks out in the engine room and quickly spreads through several decks.

Wait. No. Check that. The fire had already broken out; and so, the film actually begins with a note handed to Captain Adams (Sanders), alerting him to this situation. And despite the best efforts of second engineer Walsh (O’Brien) and his crew, taking over for the chief engineer who just died in that explosion, the domino-effect of these fires on the rest of ship’s innards, particularly the engine room, cannot be contained.

And as things get exponentially worse from there, nearly everyone tries to convince the captain that the cascading structural damage is too much for such and old ship; and it’s only a matter of time before the Claridon could, probably, will, definitely, sink, and perhaps he should alert the passengers of this, send out an S.O.S., and begin evacuation procedures; but Adams stubbornly refuses to do anything, insisting the ship will be fine.

Meanwhile, the Hendersons, Cliff (Stack), Laurie (Malone), and daughter Jill (Marihugh), blissfully unaware of the chaos below and the crisis on the bridge, are enjoying the amenities of the ship.

Seems Cliff has been transferred to Tokyo on business and decided to make a mini-vacation out of the move. But just as he leaves their cabin to retrieve his wife’s purse, left in the dining area, a now out of control boiler, super-heated by the fires, detonates several decks right below them, violently rocking the whole ship.

With that, mass panic ensues above as the engine room starts flooding underneath. And after fighting his way back to their cabin, Cliff finds Laurie alive but nearly crushed, her legs pinned under a twisted steel beam that he could not even begin to budge.

Meanwhile, Jill is also stuck on a precarious perch on the other side of a gaping hole where the floor of their cabin used to be, giving the occupants a first hand view of the sky above and what’s left of the boiler room six decks below.

And while Cliff manages a harrowing rescue of Jill, Laurie is still irrevocably trapped. And to make this bad situation even more dire, the explosion also tore a hole in the hull big enough that the pumps can no longer handle the influx of seawater and the bulkheads will not hold. 

Thus, the Claridon is now officially sinking, and will most probably be completely sunk within the hour...

Essentially shot in real time, for the next 80-some minutes of its taut and unrelenting 91-minute total, The Last Voyage (1960) squeezes every ounce of tension it can muster as it puts the audience through an emotional wringer, making it the greatest, unsung disaster movie you’ve probably never even heard of -- and that’s a damn shame, and we are here to rectify that.

For, long before Irwin Allen was capsizing ocean liners or torching skyscrapers with all-star casts in The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), and predating that glorious glut of similarly themed airline disaster movies of the 1970s like Airport (1970) and Skyjacked (1972), the filmmaking tandem of Andrew and Virginia Stone were already setting the template for the genre-to-be as far back as the mid-1950s.

Before, unless we were dealing with recreating some natural disaster with the likes of Deluge (1933) and The Hurricane (1937), or historical recreations in the vein of A Night to Remember (1958) and The Last Days of Pompeii (1959), these kinds of movies were usually about potential disasters: No Highway in the Sky (1951), Zero Hour! (1954) and The High and the Mighty (1954), where everyone’s gonna die unless someone -- through some luck and true grit, and most times, a little Divine Intervention -- pulls off a miracle and these most probable catastrophic results are averted by the skin of the protagonists’ teeth.

Even the Stones own Julie (1956), a delightful pants-on-fire melodrama, where stewardess Doris Day’s psycho ex-husband (Louis Jourdan) keeps trying to kill her, which climaxes on a airplane, with the pilot dead, the co-pilot mortally wounded, and Day pressed into the captain’s seat to take the stick, ends with her successfully landing the plane, saving the other passengers.

And they’d do it again with a plane, a bomb, and a blackmail scheme in Cry Terror! (1958) that ended happily ever after, too. But with The Last Voyage, before the audience has even settled in, the excrement hits the fan and the clock starts ticking; a bit of reverse engineering as the focus shifts from those who prevent this kind of thing to several overlapping groups trying to survive it; a true epoch moment for the genre, where the actual disaster is no longer a potential threat but an actual threat that happens at the beginning of the movie, not the climax, and drives the plot from there.

And while their airline disaster movies were tense and highly entertaining, the Stones always had their sights on something bigger; something they could blow up and sink.

Andrew and Virginia Stone.

“Ever since he can remember, Andrew Stone has been fascinated by stories of sinking ships -- the causes, the decisions the captain had to make, the panic among the passengers, and the heroism attendant to last-minute rescues,” said Herald Heffernan (The Indianapolis Star, September 27, 1959). “When Andy first stepped into the Hollywood scene 30 years ago, it was chiefly with the idea of training his nautical imagination on the production of a ship-sinking epic. The chance never came until a few months ago. In The Last Voyage, Stone realizes all of his ambitions at once.”

Stone had always been innovative as a filmmaker, beginning with Stormy Weather (1943), the first all-colored musical shot for a wide release; but after bouncing around several studios his desire for full creative control found him striking out on his own around 1950.

He first met Virginia Lively while making Fun on a Weekend (1947), a musical comedy featuring Eddie Bracken and Priscilla Lane. At the age of 16, Virginia had been a swimmer in Billy Rose’s Aquacade and later served as a lounge singer in a Honolulu nightclub before she landed a spot as a music editor on Stone’s latest film.

“I was told he was impossible on music editors,” said Virginia in an interview with Sumiko Kanmuri (The Courier Journal, July 28, 1959). “He had fired three in a row. Six weeks after we met, we married.”

The Roanoke Times (July 6, 1959).

And from there, Virginia would kind of serve as her husband’s muse as he abandoned the musical comedies he was known for to tackle far more grittier subjects with a realism seldom seen outside of films like The Naked City (1948).

Said Virginia (Kanmuri, 1959), “Until he met me he had done only musicals and comedies. Whatever the catalyst was, it changed him. Since then Andy has made only realistic pictures -- aggressive realism, we call it -- on location. Agents told me I was married to a has-been. People rejected his ideas. He had only directed. I encouraged him to write for the screen, too, and then people thought I had written the scripts for him. He had to live that down. The truth is that I only kibitzed.”

This paradigm shift began with Highway 301 (1950), which concerned a vicious gang of armed bank robbers terrorizing the east coast, who left a lot of bodies in their wake; then came The Steel Trap (1952), an inside job heist picture; and A Blueprint for Murder (1953), where a scheming woman poisons her way to an inheritance. All three were written and directed by Stone, and shot on location, for his newly minted Andrew L. Stone Productions.

Virginia, meanwhile, was far from just kibitzing on her husband’s films as she quickly graduated from music editor to film editor on Confidence Girl (1952), which sees a couple of grifters fleecing their way through Los Angeles; and The Night Holds Terror (1955), where a group of escaped felons take a family hostage and hideout in their house until the dragnet passes them by. She would do the same for Julie, too, their first, and far from last proto-disaster movie.

“I’ve visited morgues in every major American city in research on poison homicides,” said Virginia (Kanmuri, 1959) “I went to federal penitentiaries to interview prisoners. I have bought an airliner and rented subway trains in New York City.”

Those subway tunnels played an integral part in Cry Terror!, where an extortionist uses bomb threats to bilk money from an airline, which Virginia co-produced with her husband. She would do the same on The Decks Ran Red (1958), where the crew of the S.S. Berwind gets caught up “in the madness of a mutiny.”

Dubbed "Hollywood's only man-and-wife movie-makers," these low-budget crime thrillers all had a very distinctive documentarian look and feel. Verisimilitude was always one of the Stones’ trademarks. Eschewing sets and studios as much as possible in a dogged pursuit of that aggressive realism, they shot as much as they could wherever they could on location; be it on a real street, a real office building, on a train, on an airplane -- or an ocean liner.

According to Heffernan, The Last Voyage had been 'in the making' for nearly five years before it finally went into production. And the reason it took so long was because the Stones couldn’t quite find the exact ship they were looking for.

Mr. and Mrs. Moviemaker.

Inspired by the wreck of the Andrea Doria, which collided with another ship and sank off Nantucket Island in 1956, the Stones decided to up the ante and tackle a maritime disaster of their own and sold this idea to MGM for funds and distribution, leaving the couple to figure out how to pull it off. And then fate stepped in.

“It’s amazing how many [ships] are available,” said Stone (Heffernan, 1959). “At first we felt a little ridiculous when we’d telephone a steamship company and ask whether they had any ships we could sink. But surprisingly, we learned that many did have ships ready for retirement or could suggest other lines that might have one available.” Added Virginia, “Ship salvaging is a big business the world over, so it became not so much a problem of getting a ship but getting the right ship.”

Apparently, the couple first spotted the S.S. Ile de France in the summer of 1958 while sailing back from Europe after scouting several other cruise ships that failed to pass muster. At the time, the Ile de France was one of the largest and most luxurious passenger liners ever built -- “a two-stack ocean queen 790 feet long with a 23-knot speed and 43,548 gross tonnage.”

Andy and Virginia conceded to Heffernan that, at the time, they felt they had about as much chance of sinking the Ile de France for their movie as they would sailing to the moon. But, as fate would have it, the ship had reached that age where it automatically went on the retirement list and her owners were offering her up for salvage at the end of the year.

The Springfield Evening Union (March 25, 1940).

In a somewhat ironic coincidence, one of the first ships to answer the Andrea Doria’s S.O.S. call was the Ile de France, which had cruised the Atlantic between France and New York since her maiden voyage in 1926 and she survived World War II as a troop transport, earning a Croix de Guerre with palm for its service. But by 1958, her massive engines were consuming too much oil, the rust was showing, and she was headed for a final reckoning at a scrap-yard.

World famous for its accouterments, amenities and beautiful Art Deco interiors, this all made the ship ripe for the plucking. It was almost too good to be true. In fact, Stone got MGM to submit a bid on the vessel, thinking he could sink it for realsies; but they were outbid to the tune of $1.2 million by a British or Japanese outfit (depending on the source) out of Osaka, Japan, where the Ile de France would be stripped and meet its final end.

Shamokin News-Dispatch (February 23, 1959).

With that, the Stones started negotiations on a Plan B, The Arundel Castle, a British ship, but turns out they weren’t quite ready to give up on the Ile de France just yet -- and eventually struck a deal with the scrapping firm to lease the ship for the duration of filming and, basically, do whatever they wanted to it: “set it afire, blow up the decks, topple bulkheads, flood the luxurious dining salons, and sink it at the bow to tell their story,” according to Heffernan.

And so, before it would meet its final, rendered fate, the Ile de France was given a temporary reprieve, destined to set sail one last time and meet a (premature and) ignominious end on film. Said Stone (Heffernan, 1959), “How much better that she had one last fling and went down in a blaze of TechniColor glory than to be simply taken apart rivet by rivet!”

Now, this decision caused a bit of a stink with the ship’s original owners, The French Line, who threatened legal action over this deal. In fact, according to the UPI (Tucson Daily Citizen, April 10, 1959), “A spokesman said the French Line had been so determined to keep the Ile de France from an undignified end that it turned down a direct bid from Hollywood and provided in the final sale contract ‘that she not sail again.’ This sub-rental, he said, may violate the contract, and the sentimental French may fight it.”

Apparently, national sentiments were pretty high regarding the old vessel. Yoshio Kato, the captain who sailed the Ile de France from Le Harve, France, to Osaka in February, 1959, noted how a huge crowd of well wishers turned out to shed a few tears and wave bon voyage one last time as he steamed out of the harbor. (Kato and a crew of about 65 would stay on the ship during filming, manning the engines and generators to keep the lights on.)

“A grand old 54,000-ton lady may precipitate World War III -- between France and the United States,” reported the UPI (The Rockland County Journal News, May 7, 1959). “She has been rented by producer Andy Stone for his new picture, a disaster story based on the sinking of the ship. When his plans were announced it almost caused an international incident. Especially outraged was the French Line, previous owners of the flag ship. Other Frenchmen, and former passengers from all over the world, wrote, telephoned and cabled abuse to Stone. ‘It was awful,’ said the wispy, good-natured producer.”

“Farcical Finish of A Famous Old Ship” screamed a LIFE Magazine article on the film’s production, which eulogized the Île de France as an “ill-fated victim of movie realism."

Even your pets got the VIP treatment on the Ile de France.

But on April 11, 1959, the UPI reported that the French Line “have agreed to allow its one time queen of the seas to be sunk for an American made motion picture. A spokesman revealed yesterday that an agreement was reached verbally with the company which has bought the luxury liner for scrap.”

But! “The agreement stipulated that the liner should not be identified in any way with the French Lines. It must sail to its doom under a fictitious name and under non-French colors.”

The Medford Mail Tribune (January 28, 1951).

Beyond that, with a guarantee to the new owners that he wouldn’t actually sink it -- at least not completely, Stone had his Claridon and a free hand to basically do as much damage as he liked to get what he wanted on film. And with a combination of massive pyrotechnics and a few fire-hoses, the director basically did everything BUT sink the ship, much to the peril of his cast and crew, and much to the eventual chagrin of critics and audience members who easily identified the Not Ile de France.

“The filmmakers contract specifies that the name Ile de France must not be used in any publicity, but there is little doubt that the thousands who sailed on the vessel during her 31 years of service would recognize her on the screen,” said Judith Crist (New York Magazine, April 23, 1959).

When Crist asked for comment, “Stone said he was legally forbidden to discuss the Ile de France specifically, and would disclose only that he was going to make his movie in Japan, with filming scheduled to start during the first week of May (1959).” 

“It’s breaking my heart not to talk about it,” said Stone (UPI, 1959). “One word from me will ruin everything and make a million enemies.” The film would be shot in the Inland Sea off the coast of Osaka, where the Not Ile de France was towed into its shallow waters, where it would eventually be partially sunk. 

During the flooding sequences, Stone arranged for several fire boats to shoot jets of water through the portholes. And the Hendersons cabin was built in the Not Ile de France’s former swimming pool, so it could be flooded under *ahem* ‘nominally controlled conditions.’

There’s also an apocryphal story where the production ran into some trouble with the local Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, who threatened violence and sabotage unless the production paid into their protection racket, which allegedly came to blows between Stone and the gangsters' negotiator.

The News and Observer (August 9, 1959).

While visiting this floating set, Kenneth Ishi gave this rather gloomy report (The News and Observer, August 9, 1959): “A guide led visitors through corridors and stairways (of the ship), dank and stale-smelling from disuse, through a cavernous kitchen with stoves long unlit. The main salon, which once echoed to the laughter of elegantly dressed men and women as they dined and danced, now was naked, glass doors and brass knobs dirty with dust and fingerprints that no steward on the Ile de France would have dared allow."

And it only got worse from there: "Workmen swung at the walls with hammers, showering dust, plaster and splinters everywhere. A black grand piano was the only major item of furniture remaining and it hung precariously over a gaping, jagged hole in the floor. The hole was above what had been the ship’s chapel, where white plaster walls crumpled and velvet covered pews were heavy with dust and debris.” 

Now, the wreckers had already stripped most of the interiors bare by the time the Stones got their hands on the ship. And so, Virginia was promoted to production designer as well and oversaw the restoration of the needed areas. “I went shopping for ocean liners, and we got this baby,” said Virginia (Heffernan, 1959) “We brought her back to life. It’s sort of a one last fling of gaiety and laughter for the old girl.”

Nearly sixty years removed from any of these sentimental attachments, one can only watch what Stone did to both the Not Ile de France and his actors in The Last Voyage and shake our collective heads, boggle, and then splutter and question the sanity of those involved; but, damn, if it wasn’t effective.

From the futile efforts to contain the rapidly flooding engine room, to the raging fires, to the multiple explosions, to the collapse of one of the smokestacks, to the actual flooding of the ship to get the proper list and the eventual full submergence of the bow for the climax, Stone’s camera is front and center; and what it captures as the cast valiantly tries to prioritize, sacrifice, and save as many lives as they can really sucks you in. These efforts also garnered the production an Academy Award nomination for Best Special Effects -- but, alas, they would lose to Gene Warren and Projects Unlimited for their work on The Time Machine (1960).

Now, for the benefit of those readers who haven’t had the opportunity to watch The Last Voyage yet, Spoilers Ahoy! from here on out as Cliff desperately searches for some professional help to free his wife when additional muscle power proves just as fruitless at moving the obstruction.

He finds it initially with Lawson (Strode), one of the engineers, who informs only a blowtorch will free and save Laurie. For this they’ll need not one cumbersome tank, but two (-- oxygen and acetylene). And while they manage to get one tank into the cabin, this takes so long the other is now irrevocably trapped underwater in the sealed-off engine room.

Meanwhile, Adams has finally come around and the dreaded announcement is finally given: abandon ship.

With that, Laurie convinces Cliff to at least get Jill to one of the lifeboats. And once they’re gone, with no hope, a distraught Laurie knows the only way Cliff will ever leave the ship without her is if she is already dead. 

After begging him to kill her, Laurie scares off Lawson with this rash talk. Alone, she manages to get her hands on a shard of glass and tries to slash her wrists; but the distraught Laurie cannot go through with it.

When Lawson reports his wife’s fragile mental state, Cliff leaves Jill with him and returns to the cabin, where the rising water has started lapping in under the fractured wall

Back on deck, Lawson gets Jill to safety and bellows at the others in the lifeboat to get to the rescue ship and bring back an acetylene tank. If they even heard him, no one can say.

On the bridge, Adams is starting to feel the wrath of his subordinates for his earlier inaction, and even comes to blows with Walsh, who managed to only save five out of his original crew of 38 from the flooded engine room. 

Here, a desperate Cliff tracks them both down, holding out hope that one of them can provide a miracle.

But there are none to be had on the doomed Claridon. All Walsh can do is confirm that without a blowtorch, Laurie is destined to drown. 

And judging by the rising level of water, she only has about another ten minutes before she's fully submerged. All seems lost for the Hendersons then, until salvation comes from a most unexpected source.

Apparently, because the Inland Sea was a haven for poisonous jellyfish, all the lifeboat scenes were filmed much later in Santa Monica, California, sometime in early October, 1959, which were later added in optically to the sinking Claridon footage shot near Osaka. They also negotiated the use of The Hawaiian Fisherman, “a sleek new freighter” as the rescue ship, which dropped anchor in the harbor and floated in the background.

But the Stones ran into a ton of technical difficulties there, too, which stretched these insert shots out for nearly three weeks. The first attempt was a washout due to some inclement weather. The second was called off when a camera seized and fell apart. But the third attempt proved the charm, officially wrapping the film.

The Los Angeles Times (February 24, 1960).

“There’s a touch of sadness in watching this luxury queen reduced to a slowly sinking thing of the sea that can’t be saved,” said critic Ed Hocura (The Hamilton Spectator, February 27, 1960). “Since she was headed for the scrap heap anyway, all will agree that Andrew Stone has sent her to the bottom in style.”

In further praise of Stone, Hocura called him “a filmmaker who has pursued a path of production unrivaled by any other producer. He has always made his pictures away from a studio, and this is to achieve realism for dramatic purposes.”

The Daily News (February 14, 1960).

And with “its building suspense right from the start and never letting up for a minute,” Hocura would also compare Stone’s latest efforts to that of Alfred Hitchcock. But Hitchcock, says Hocura, "probably would have given in to the temptation of focusing the story around a central character in contrast to how Stone has his stars take second place to the ship.”

Stone would get “admirable support from cameraman Hal Mohr, whose interior shots and unusual angles heighten the suspense,” said Hocura. And Virginia Stone’s film editing “is a splendid example of how this talented woman works so well with her husband. By contrasting scenes with split-second timing, and integrating the scenes of Dorothy Malone trying to hold her head above water with her husband trying desperately to get an acetylene torch to free her, Mrs. Stone does a bang-up job.”

The Columbia Daily Tribune (March 13, 1960).

And in conclusion, “It’s to Andrew Stone’s credit that he concentrates more on the doomed ship, and he manages to put the viewer right on board for some spine-tingling moments.” And Hocura might’ve been right -- at least to a certain extent.

Honestly, The Last Voyage isn’t one of Edmond O’Brien’s best acting efforts. He’s one of my favorite actors but, as Walsh, he spits the bit quite frequently and there’s a lot of scenery with his teeth marks left in them, which presciently predicted another disaster movie staple, I guess.

To be fair, the whole cast was put through all kinds of hell during the production. O’Brien even called out his director, saying Stone was “a psychopath with a death wish.” I particularly loved the climax, where the boat is actually sinking and the last survivors of the Claridon fight their way along the swamped deck as water rushes over the side and O’Brien basically says “screw this, I’m out” and abandons the scene early.

Woody Strode fares better, with a far meatier role than he’s usually saddled with. (He got it when Sidney Poitier turned it down.) The scene where he recoils from Laurie’s assisted suicide request is a thing of beauty.

George Sanders actually reins it in a bit as the doomed, ifs ’n’ buts Captain Adams, destined to go down with the ship when that damaged smokestack finally collapsed onto his cabin, crushing him. Luckily, he was blessed with a very competent crew, who keeps things well-organized and moving properly enough that they manage to get all the other passengers off without any additional casualties.

Robert Stack was another late sub for Stuart Whitman, who had starred in The Decks Ran Red for Stone. Solid as always, Stack also called out Stone over his recklessness in his autobiography, Straight Shooting (1980), saying he was lucky to have survived the production. “"No special effects for Andy [Stone],” recalled Stack. “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."

I’m telling ya, the scenes which showcased his efforts to save young Tammy Marihugh, sans stunt performers from what I could see, from her precarious predicament after the initial explosion are just incredible -- and perhaps a little foolhardy and bordering on child endangerment charges.

And credit to Marihugh, too, for giving one of the best performances by a child actor that I’ve ever had the pleasure to endure. (Sadly, I think they dubbed her, which is unfortunate.)

And yet, despite her essentially thankless role, spending nearly the entire production trapped under the rubble, it is Dorothy Malone who wins and delivers the movie with her fraught performance.

Her desperate pleas for release, her anguish, her fear, her pain, as her life expectancy ticks away, and later, as the water incrementally engulfs her, are mesmerizing. And, oh, holy crap! That look on her face when all those efforts to free her finally reach fruition, and Cliff pulls, and she comes loose, and her eyes snap wide, and Laurie realizes she is finally free -- a relief the actress probably felt on the set, too, I’m sure -- it doesn’t get much more real than that, Fellow Programs, and had me clapping and cheering.

Obviously, I like this film a whole lot but I do have two major problems with it. One, is the constantly intrusive narration of Joe Marston, who played Ragland, one of those officers whose initial pleas for ‘erring on the side of caution’ fell on deaf ears. It kept popping up at the wrong time, breaking the film’s rhythm, and belaboring the obvious by restating what was exactly happening on screen, making it even more redundant.

The second hiccup is that at some point, surely, a second solution to Laurie’s predicament should’ve been broached when the blowtorch proved unattainable. And that option, obviously, was an amputation. Surely the ship’s doctor and medical suite would’ve had the equipment and know-how to handle such a medical crisis, and would prove more accessible than the flooded machine shop. (The film mentions that several other doctors are on board, too, helping the injured.)

And if it came down to drowning or losing a leg (or legs), personally, I’d choose not drowning. Granted, we only really see Laurie from the shoulder blades up once she’s trapped so this might not have been as practical a solution as I think.

Beyond that, I cannot stress enough how enjoyable The Last Voyage is, and how effectively the Stones slather on the tension as situations are aggravated further and things become more hopeless with each spiraling minute and every inch of rising water. Between Stone's direction and wife Virginia's skillful editing this film was all about acceleration and they pulled it off beautifully.

Thus, you don’t want any of these people to drown -- not even Captain Adams. And the hands-on, no-nonsense, no-filler approach of the Stones was a refreshing change of pace that had me riveted until the very end, and completely exhausted when it was over.

Originally posted on March 6, 2016, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

The Last Voyage (1960) Andrew L. Stone Productions :: MGM / P: Andrew L. Stone, Virginia L. Stone / D: Andrew L. Stone / W: Andrew L. Stone / C: Hal Mohr / E: Virginia L. Stone / M: Andrew L. Stone, Virginia L. Stone, Rudy Schrager / S: Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, George Sanders, Edmond O'Brien, Woody Strode, Tammy Marihugh, Joe Marston