The Last Voyage
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| The Last Voyage (1960) | |
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| Directed by | Andrew L. Stone |
| Produced by | Andrew L. Stone Virginia Stone |
| Written by | Andrew L. Stone (screenplay) |
| Starring | Robert Stack Dorothy Malone George Sanders Woody Strode Edmond O'Brien |
| Music by | Rudy Schrager |
| Cinematography | Hal Mohr |
| Editing by | Virginia L. Stone |
| Distributed by | Metro Goldwyn Mayer |
| Release date(s) | February 19, 1960 |
| Running time | 91 min. |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
The Last Voyage is a 1960 American action-adventure melodrama film.
Its plot concerns the sinking of fictional aged ocean liner SS Claridon in the Pacific Ocean and focuses on Laurie and Cliff Henderson, who are relocating to Tokyo, Japan with their daughter. The ship's faulty boilers explode, and Laurie is trapped under wreckage in their stateroom. Most of the action revolves around Cliff's efforts to free her before the vessel sinks.
Other key characters are Captain Robert Adams, a rather arrogant and clueless man who likes to impress his passengers and intimidate his crew and officers, Second Engineer Walsh, who lost his father on the RMS Titanic and has a premonition that the Claridon will meet a similar fate, and crewman Hank Lawson, who helps rescue the endangered couple.
Andrew L. Stone directed his own screenplay. The cast includes Robert Stack as Cliff, Dorothy Malone as Laurie, George Sanders as Adams, Edmond O'Brien as Walsh, and Woody Strode as Lawson.
The ship used in the film was the legendary French luxury liner S.S. Ile de France, which had been in service from 1926 until 1959, when it was sold to a Japanese scrapyard by her owners, who were appalled when they discovered the ship had been leased to MGM as a floating prop. The ship was towed to shallow waters, where her forward compartments were flooded (so she appeared to be sinking by the bow). Her forward funnel was sent crashing into the deckhouse and her Art Deco interiors were destroyed by explosives and/or flooded. According to William H. Miller, American maritime historian, The French Line thereafter forbade any use of the ships they sold for scrap to be used for anything other than scrapping.
The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Special Effects.
The film marked the third and final pairing of Malone and Stack. They previously had co-starred in Written on the Wind (1956) and The Tarnished Angels (1958), both times with Rock Hudson.
