Mal de Mer

VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED Directed by STUART ROSENBERG Screenplay by STEVE SHAGAN and DAVID BUTLER

From the Titanic through the Ship of Fools, the movies have seldom undertaken a more top-heavy displeasure cruise than this one. The passenger list for Voyage of the Damned is heavily booked with star types--Max Von Sydow, Oskar Werner, Malcolm McDowell, Faye Dunaway, Lee Grant, James Mason, Orson Welles, Ben Gazzara and Katharine Ross--along with an affecting newcomer, Lynne Frederick. All have been brought aboard to add glamour to the journey, but the effort is futile. The actors struggle, usually valiantly (Werner, Von Sydow, Mason), sometimes campily (Dunaway, Welles), but are ultimately undone.

Like a lot of silly movies, Voyage of the Damned is extracted from a serious idea--in this case one with historical foundation. In 1939, as part of a propaganda effort, the Nazis bundled Jews from all levels of German life, privileged to deprived, onto a Hamburg-Amerika liner, the St. Louis. The ship was bound out of Hamburg to Havana, Cuba, where the passengers understood they could disembark if they chose. Once in Havana harbor, however, the Jews were not allowed off the ship. Their landing permits had been deliberately scrambled by the Cuban government in league with the Nazis, who wanted the ship to sail from port to port searching for asylum. The St. Louis would then become a diplomatic liability, an embarrassment, and would be an active demonstration, according to the Nazis, of what a "problem" the Jews were. This squalid footnote to the Holocaust raises some curious questions--prominent among them is why President Franklin Roosevelt turned the St. Louis away from the shores of Florida*--and comes up way short on answers. Director Stuart Rosenberg (The Drowning Pool) and Scenarists Shagan (Save the Tiger) and Butler are primarily interested in letting the shipboard soap operas play out to their predictable conclusions: Will the Werner-Dunaway marriage unthaw on the bounding main? Will Lee Grant be able to control her melancholiac husband, who is, she announces, "retreating into himself? "Your orders come straight from Berlin. If you refuse to accept them, be prepared to accept the consequences for yourself--and your family." Will Malcolm McDowell have a chance to initiate Lynne Frederick into the mysteries of "what it is to be a woman"? Some vulgarity can be amusing, but Voyage of the Damned is not only amusing but is also debasing.

Jay Cocks

* Sympathetic to the refugee dilemma but under domestic political pressure mostly from the right as he prepared for an election year, Roosevelt did not overrule the State Department decision to bar the ship from America.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.