Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

Voyage of the Damned Blu-ray Movie Review

Rudderless.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 9, 2013

As we grow further and further away from the manifold horrors of World War II and especially those of the Holocaust, fewer and fewer survivors are still around to testify as to what happened and to put the lie to those who claim that nothing happened. Even for some well meaning people who have no doubt that the Holocaust happened view it as almost an abstraction. Some of us, however, have a more personal connection to what occurred only two generations or so ago. My own paternal grandfather and eldest uncle simply “disappeared”, as so many European Jews did, during the late thirties or early forties, and even efforts of some very able and devoted genealogists haven’t been able to discover what happened to them. My wife’s grandmother was spirited out of Eastern Europe in the late thirties because she was the youngest of a large family. While she got to America and lived a very long life, every last one of her eleven siblings plus both of her parents perished in the concentration camps. My wife and I also know a couple of very elderly Jews who live here in Portland at a Jewish retirement home where we occasionally volunteer who bear the horrific “scar” of their internment—numbers tattooed on their arms. For those with this kind of connection, therefore, the pure human drama of the real story behind Voyage of the Damned doesn’t play like fiction or some supposedly "exaggerated" tale, as the almost unfathomable callousness of several major nations (including not so coincidentally the United States) not to allow a boatload of Jewish refugees to come ashore seems like a perfect little microcosm of untold millennia of anti-Semitism, however “nicely” it’s cloaked in more formal matters of emigration policy and the like. And that of course was exactly what the Nazi regime wanted to happen with this gaggle of Jews from all socioeconomic strata. They put these people on a rather luxe ocean liner, ostensibly bound for Cuba, with the full knowledge that not only would Cuba not allow the Jews on board to disembark, probably no other nation would, either. That would leave the boat with no choice but the return to Germany, where the Nazis felt at the point they would have more or less received a tacit carte blanche from the international community on how to handle to supposed “Jewish problem”.

As visceral as the real events of the M.S. St. Louis undeniably are, unfortunately the film version of Voyage of the Damned is an uneven and at times frustrating affair. Part of this is due to the decision to make this an “all star” film, almost in the same vein as disaster movies like 1972's The Poseidon Adventure and 1974's The Towering Inferno, or in fact like another 1974 opus, the Albert Finney version of Murder on the Orient Express. The fact is, Voyage of the Damned takes that same approach and only ups the ante, offering a huge cast of then A-list talent, along with a gigantic coterie of character actors, and throws them together in a mélange that quite frequently provides the performers with only seconds of screen time in any given sequence. There is therefore a really jumbled quality to much of Voyage of the Damned, as scenarists Steve Shagan and David Butler (adapting the book by Gordon Thomas Max Morgan-Witts) and director Stuart Rosenberg ping pong between a number of simultaneously unfolding dramas taking place between various sets of passengers. The result is a kind of ungainly and often unfocused tour through an obviously intentional microcosm of various classes of European Jewry. (It should be noted that Shagan and Butler received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, so someone evidently appreciated their approach more than I do.)

The film becomes such a series of cameos that it’s ultimately distracting, but buried within the nonstop parade of star appearances are several (too many, in fact) characters that the film attempts to flesh out. Voyage of the Damned seems intent on giving the audience a representative slice of Jews from every social and economic stratum imaginable. Therefore we have the high class Professor Egon Kreisler (Oskar Werner) and his wife Denise (Faye Dunaway), who are also an “intermarried” couple; the middle class Rosens, including husband Carl (Sam Wanamaker), wife Lili (Lee Grant, Oscar nominated for this role), and daughter Anna (Lynne Frederick), all three of whom have brushes—and in one case more than merely a brush—with death or destitution on the trek; slightly lower class Mr. and Mrs. Hauser (Nehemiah Persoff and Maria Schell), who are briefly reunited with their daughter Mira (Katharine Ross) in Cuba, where Mira has become a “working girl”; and Jonathan Pryce and Paul Koslo as two concentration camp prisoners who are released—shaved heads and all—as part of the Nazis’ propaganda campaign. The fact that this brief list doesn’t even include other characters like the St. Louis’ stalwart (and non-Nazi) German Captain (Max Von Sydow); a gaggle of other Jews played by such luminaries as Julie Harris, Wendy Hiller and Luther Adler; a steward played by Malcolm McDowell who becomes romantically entwined with Anna Rosen; Janet Suzman as a distraught mother having to bid her two young daughters goodbye; James Mason, Orson Welles and Jose Ferrer depicting various Cuban officials and/or players in deciding what to do with the Jews; Ben Gazzara as an activist who brings the plight of the refugees to global attention; and scores of other actors as well should highlight just how diffused so much of Voyage of the Damned turns out to be.

Perhaps surprisingly, director Stuart Rosenberg doesn’t really seem to have a firm grasp on how to shape this ungainly material, and in fact even from a technical perspective parts of this film are at least questionable. Over and over again Rosenberg frames things with huge looming objects, whether they be a character or some inanimate object, taking up the bulk of the frame (quite often out of focus), while what really matters is pushed to the sidelines. Some takes seem almost to have been rehearsals, with shaky camera moves and uncertain line readings. Also rather incredibly, even at over two and a half hours, this is an edited version of the film, which evidently clocked in at well over three hours in its original version. While that may indicate the desire on the part of the filmmakers to craft a kind of “roadshow” epic, what it actually ends up doing is simply offering the viewer and often shapeless mass of casually intersecting plot points, with surprisingly little emotional content.

Still, there are things to recommend this film, notably some of the performances. While Grant got the lion’s share of the attention for her now infamous hair cutting scene, other actors perhaps do better, if manifestly less showy, jobs in other roles. Jonathan Pryce and Paul Koslo are quite moving as the concentration camp survivors. Their first scene at an opulent dinner aboard the St. Louis is incredible and one of the best things in the film, as small and unheralded as it is. Dunaway is also surprisingly strong in this piece, acting as an emotional anchor for several characters who are on the brink of breakdowns. Von Sydow also is excellent as a man who risks everything for people he’s come to feel personally responsible for.

What might have helped Voyage of the Damned is a more focused approach that centered on, say, only one or two examples of the people caught up in this unsettling situation. That might have freed the story to more fully explore some of the issues, rather than giving us bullet points like a Reader’s Digest recap of the convoluted history involved. Perhaps unintentionally, the film also drastically misstates the mortality rate of the passengers, most of whom ended up in countries which were soon to be overrun by the Nazis. More recent review of the story has suggested that the vast majority of the passengers actually ended up surviving. That’s yet another story that deserves treatment. It’s ironic that at either two and a half- or three-plus hours, Voyage of the Damned is both too long and too short to really dig into these matters with sufficient scope and effect.

Voyage of the Damned Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Voyage of the Damned is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Timeless Media Group (an imprint of Shout! Factory) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Shout! has evidently entered into a licensing deal with the old ITV catalog, for they are bringing out several ITV films, largely from the seventies (the Count of Monte Cristo / Man Friday double feature is another example). The elements here are in decent enough shape, though colors appear to have faded, at least in parts, and my hunch is this is an older master, given some of the overall rough texture. Some sequences actually look rather nicely saturated (see the screenshot of Suzman and her daughters, where the reds and blues are really pretty good looking), but many are just slightly pallid, especially with regard to flesh tones, which tend to tip a bit toward the pink side of things. While there is some (expected) age related wear and tear, there's nothing horribly distracting here. The image is decently sharp, though Rosenberg and DP Billy Williams filter some shots (a kind of odd choice, given the subject matter), making things appear rather gauzy and soft. Contrast is quite good and shadow detail is at least acceptable if not stellar. In a way, it looks like Shout! is going the way of Olive Films with these catalog releases, not doing any restoration but also not digitally tweaking anything. Therefore, this boasts a nicely filmic appearance, though the age and condition of the elements have a few issues that some may find momentarily distracting.

Voyage of the Damned Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Voyage of the Damned features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track (delivered via DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0) which sounds fine, if narrow, aside from some very minor pops that crop up. Dialogue is cleanly and clearly presented (though some of the actors portraying Germans or other nationalities adopt those faux accents which have been a staple of film since time immemorial). The best part of this track is Lalo Schifrin's Oscar nominated score, which includes some really lush orchestral cues as well as Schifrin's native take on Cuban rhythms like the rhumba or the mambo. Fidelity is excellent and dynamic range is quite wide.

Voyage of the Damned Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 3:56)


• Photo Gallery (1080i; 1:37)

Voyage of the Damned Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I think if Voyage of the Damned had stayed with the two characters it starts with—the two concentration camp survivors—it would have been one of the most chilling pre-Schindler's List indictments of the incipient madness that would soon become the full fledged Holocaust. As it stands, the film simply tries to stuff in too many characters and storylines for its own good, and it's further hobbled by what was no doubt a marketing decision to feature an "all star" cast, where seemingly every new scene brings us yet another name actor emoting for a few seconds. Still, there is some great material here—not enough to warrant two and a half, let alone three, hours, but there nonetheless. The story itself is amazing and certainly deserves to be told. The film is a decidedly mixed bag, but with caveats noted, this Blu-ray comes Recommended.