Ship Ahoy!

 

Over at Monday Music Moves Me, their theme was in dedication to Titanic that sank back on April 14, 1912. That made me think about all the Titanic films, then I went to movies involving ship disasters and finally, decided to just speak about movies that take place on a ship. I went with cruise ships and chose these 3 films…

1. ROMANCE ON THE HIGH SEAS-1948

I now have TCM and you can tell I am loving it since my ass appears to be getting bigger. Anyways, I finally saw this film that introduces Doris Day in her first film and she does great job as a singer hired by Janis Paige to impersonate her on a cruise ship. Janis suspects that her husband is having an affair and remains in New York City to catch her husband in the act. Her husband, played by Don Defore, believes his wife is having an affair and hires a PI, played by Jack Carson, to watch over his wife. Yup, the perfect set-up for romance and, yup, Carson and Day meet up on the ship and fall in love with each believing the other is someone else. For good measure, throw in Oscar Levant for some ascerbic comedy and elegant piano playing. Doris sings her heart out and I love her fresh faced, but knowing character who you would never think would turn into a hoity-toity, business woman refusing Rock Hudson in later films. She and Carson have real chemistry( they had an affair while making this film) and she steals every scene.

2. SHIP OF FOOLS-1965

This is not a happy film with many people on this ship having to deal with death, imprisonment, loss of beauty, racism/anti-semitism and a German asshole and blowhard. Simone Signoret plays a Contessa going to jail, in Spain, for aiding the Rebel Cause and uprising in 1933 Cuba. She falls in love with the doctor, played so well by Oskar Werner, with a severe heart condition. George Segal and Elizabeth Ashley are lovers who are artists but George doesn’t take his gal’s artwork seriously. Vivien Leigh is the once beautiful socialite whose beauty is declining along with her pleasant manner who has great disdain for Lee Marvin, a British baseball player who has eyes for the Flamenco dancers. Then you have the disgusting idiot German, played to the hilt by Jose Ferrer who openly shows his racial hatred to the Jewish people and other undesirables. The undesirable in question is the dwarf, played by Michael Dunn, who is the center for everything going on in this ship. Dunn received an Oscar nomination for this role and I’m glad he did. This is an excellent film to see as a great character study all set on this ship.

3. VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED-1975

This is the true story of the over 900 Jewish passengers, on board the St. Louis cruise ship headed by the heroic Capt. Schroeder, played by Max Von Sydow, who desperately tries to save the lives of these Jewish people. They thought they were home free escaping the persecution of the Jews in 1939 Germany, but were not allowed into Cuba because their Visas are now considered invalid. The Captain  travels to Florida beseeching the American Government to take on the Jewish refugees but were turned away. When the captain wants to run the ship aground, the American ships follow the refugee ship out to opens waters. His next stop is Canada but, they are turned away as well. The Captain travels to England where, finally, a third of the passengers are taken by England with the rest taken in by the French and The Netherlands. You find out that, since the Nazis took over France and The Netherlands before being defeated in 1945, that of over the 900 Jewish people on that ship, over 600 were killed in the camps. This is a star-studded film headed by Faye Dunaway and Oskar Werner as wealthy, avant-Garde couple plus others who  are terrified for their future. James Mason, Orson Welles, Lee Grant plus so many others are on this ship with lives that we get to see. It is a film forgotten but one that should not be. It’s an excellent film that is tension filled with a splash of glamour but it is no Love Boat.

Any cruise ship movies you can think of?