Rating: B+
Dir: Andrew L. Stone.
Star: Robert Stack, George Sanders, Dorothy Malone, Edmond O’Brien.
This is among my favourite disaster movies, because it is absolutely goddamn relentless. It begins immediately, literally a few seconds in, with a fire in the engine room of the SS Claridon. It’s an aging ocean liner, being nursed for a few more voyages by its captain, Robert Adams (Sanders) before being scrapped. Fate has other plans. A stuck boiler valve leads to an explosion, and a slow yet inevitable demise. This happens despite the best efforts of second engineer Walsh (O’Brien), and Capt. Adams’s robust attempt to keep the ship afloat through pure denial. Trapped in the explosion is Laurie Henderson (Malone), whose husband Cliff (Stack) refuses to abandon his wife to a moist death.
I said “slow,” but that’s one thing this is not. It unfolds in real time, with Cliff’s efforts to free Laurie running alongside Walsh’s efforts to shore up a bulkhead, which is virtually the only thing keeping the boat above the water. This all looks extraordinarily real, and that’s because it was. For the production rented an actual 800-ft liner, the SS Ile de France, from a Japanese scrapyard. This was then wrecked, flooded and genuinely almost sunk, for the purposes of the movie. The previous owners were less than impressed by their vessel’s new career in Hollywood, and required all trace of its previous life and name to get erased. It definitely did not die in vain.
The breathless pace means there’s not much time devoted specifically to character building, yet it does the job. Cliff is loyal to a fault, first rescuing their young daughter, in a disturbing scene which had us wondering if they were using a tiny stuntperson. Laurie, meanwhile, has her own moment, reaching for a shard of glass to kill herself, knowing it’s the only way her husband will leave. As the water rises, her position becomes genuinely concerning. This was based on a real incident during an earlier liner sinking, the SS Andrea Doria in 1956, where passenger Martha Peterson was trapped by debris in her cabin. Weirdly, the ship which picked up most of the survivors that day? The SS Ile de France.
Meanwhile, Captain Adams is a bit of a dick, to put it mildly. He’s more concerned about his future position in the shipping company, than the safety of his crew and passengers. It’s especially notable in the early stages, where the travellers are dining and partying above decks, while the boat is in flames below. Also notable: the way the Hendersons just dump their child off at a puppet show, then head off for martinis and dancing. Hey, it was the sixties. Child endangerment aside, this feels as if somebody took James Cameron’s Titanic, ruthlessly editing out all the boring bits and Celine Dion. The Oscar nomination for Best Special Effects was fully deserved. Its loss to The Time Machine proves poor judgment in the Academy is not a new invention.