The opening 40 minutes or so of this film are fantastic. Cooper and Heston are excellent. The sets and special effects are extraordinarily good and exceptionally realistic for the era and everyone should be gripped by this point. We then move to the first and most crippling thorn in the side of this film, Richard Harris. His role is small but important and played with all the subtlety of a lead balloon. With an accent that varies from brummie to cockney to South African (but is defiantly never Irish), he dominates every scene in which he appears in a way that - thanks to his acting - his character somehow never quite manages. We then move to what should appear to be a gripping peak, Cooper's day in court. This is a critical part of the story, but minor sub-plots, instead of being used to build up or sustain the tension, instead provide distractions and disperse much of the energy. The court case which is deliberately anti-climactic should serve to drive the momentum of the story forward, but comes across as a sort of ineffectual interlude until we are allowed to return to the drama of the final reel. Here again all is fine and things begin to build up again until Harris is required to take the menace and terror up a further notch. He fails. There is drama, but it's nothing to what it might have been. The film closes with a nondescript scene tying up loose ends and includes the line "I think perhaps there will be serious charges against the owners in London". Well gosh, really!
Review of The Wreck of the Mary Deare
