The Last Voyage

Caught this one on TCM last night, already started. A ship is going down. The captain, played by George Sanders, appears hesitant, unsure, inflexible, as he tried to deal with many decisions at once. His accent, and that of his assistant, are both English, and contrast strongly with the Yankee informality of the rest of the uniformed crew. Edmond O'Brien plays the chief engineer (Walsh), for whom saving his men becomes paramount as the tragedy deepens. Robert Stack plays Cliff Henderson, whose wife, Laurie (Dorothy Malone), is trapped by a fallen beam.

Woody Strode plays Hank Lawson, a crew member who does help Henderson rescue his trapped wife. Eventually, once his men are safe, so does Walsh. They cut the steel, so Mrs. Henderson can escape, just in time. Lawson walks around shirtless the entire time, and he is quite well built.

Strode was a decathlete and football star who went on to become a pioneering black American film actor. He was nominated for a Golden Globe award for best supporting actor for his role in Spartacus in 1960.

I was struck by the film for a couple of reasons: it seemed almost the template for future disaster films; and Strode had a dignified role, and some body. For 1960, a good film, but only to a certain extent. The ;last line of dialogue spoken is by Henderson, who says, as Lawson is about to be pulled into a lifeboat, says, now this is a man I want to help. Wooden, stiff; could have had a little more emotion.

The narrator was Charles Laughton, not a favorite. Dorothy Malone, who had played the Acme Book Shop Proprietress in The Big Sleep, and would go on to lay in Peyton Place, was in her bleached blonde phase already. I remember, some years ago, realizing who she was on watching the Bogart film, again, and being astounded by the difference between her looks in 1946 and 20 years later.