Voyage of the Damned (1976) -

A well-intentioned treatment of a devastating historical tragedy. The film takes on one of the most morbidly cynical instances of Nazi propaganda: sending a luxury liner loaded with exiled elite and middle class Jews from Hamburg to Havana with the expectation that they would be refused entry to Cuba or U.S., and thus "make the point" that no nation wanted the Jews and so fortify the ideological/propaganda claims for the efficacy of the Nazi's "final solution." The film endeavors to demonstrate this conscious, cynical manipulation of humanity through the largely fictionalized retelling of the historical tale. A vast cast of diversely celebrated actors inhabits the 20 or so roles and the film works steadfastly to maneuver these many storylines while amplifying the dramatic tension of a narrative which most audience-members would likely know or anticipate the outcome. The results are mixed largely, I suspect, because the film becomes a strange fusion of genres. By the mid-1970s, vast casts had accomplished critical and popular success on two main fronts: disaster epics and Agatha Christie mysteries. In many ways, this film feels like The Poseidon Adventure or Murder on the Orient Express with lots of noteworthy actors essaying a broad array of distinctive characters. Yet in this film, the murder is genocidal and the disaster is in the abstract -- so the genre pleasures of a disaster flick or a murder mystery are gone, making the work of this narrative feel like work. The film feels so overwhelmed by the sense of impending doom that it's hard to know where to position oneself as an audience member. Making things worse is that the acting styles are comparably incongruent -- lots of Actor's Studio types (Lee Grant, Nehemiah Persoff, Luther Adler, Julie Harris) mixed in with folks like Malcolm McDowell, Wendy Hiller and Jonathan Pryce who are all being presided over by the Faye Dunaway, Max Von Sydow, and Oskar Werner (with Ben Gazzara, Orson Welles and Jose Ferrer tossed in the mix just for fun). The cast is vast and often fascinating but rarely brought to stylistic coherence. Instead the film becomes a curious kaleidoscope of different glimpses into different characters and, once again, it's left to the audience to piece it all together. Two things stand out to me in reflecting on the film. First, there seems to be an argument going on within the film about the psychology of victimization (perhaps most neatly embodied by the two camp escapees played by Jonathan Pryce and Aaron Pozner). The film seems to be rehearsing the tension between the options available to Jews in the face of mounting Nazism: standing up against the tyranny or trying to disappear for fear that you might be next. This tension -- respond with pride or react with fear -- are (a) both shown to be basically inadequate and (b) both teased out with more sophisticated nuance in the different approaches to the crisis embodied by the Kreislers (Dunaway and Werner) and the Rosens (Lee Grant, Sam Wanamaker, and Lynne Frederick). The film tacitly takes the side of pride (not the most precise word but it's what I have right now) but empathetically details the psychic costs of living in fear that it might be you next. Sam Wanamaker's Carl Rosen experiences a paranoid psycotic break; Frederick's Anna opts for a suicide pact; and Grant's Lili is first brittle and then broken with grief. I find this duality interesting as a first wave of pop cultural/pop psychological explanations of the emotional reaction to the historical phenomenon of Nazi fascism. Seems to twine well with psychoanalytic tropes as well as with much of the Actor's Studio basic approach to things. The second thing I found interesting is how vivid Katharine Ross was in her two scene role as a young woman working as a prostitute in Havana as a means to help her parents escape. In her two scenes, Ross delivers what so few of the other performers do: a legible characterization animated by palpable emotion. (Gazzara, McDowell and Von Sydow aren't bad either on this same front, but their characterizations are a touch less vivid.) I've been struggling to figure out why so few of the scenes in this film were able to develop the kind of emotional clarity that Ross was able to inject in her scenes. She's not the most sophisticated actress but she is emotionally present and fairly guileless as a performer; perhaps as a result, I never lost sense of what was at stake in Ross's scenes. A lot happens in both, from a plot perspective, yet those plot points are vividly alive in a way that comparably dense scenes elsewhere in the film are simply not. In some ways, it seems as if the film is relying on its historical facticity to inject empathy into the characters, as though director Stuart Rosenberg doesn't want to meddle in the crafting of performances. Unfortunately, the lack of a coherent, emotional texture among the performances makes this film unfortunately tendentious. This story might have been emotionally eviscerating; in this numbed out telling, it's a historical shockudrama with unfortunately blunted impact. A fascinating failure of a film.