Review of The Last Voyage

Here is positive proof that disaster thriller movies did not originate with Irwin Allen. Since an actual ocean liner named the Ile de France was slated for destruction at a shipyard, writer-director Andrew L. Stone got his meat hooks on the vessel and set about destroying it and capturing the process on film. All he had to do was fashion a plot about a fire that breaks out in the engine room of the S.S. Claridon and imperils both passengers and crew members. In so doing, Stone turned the cast members into stunt persons. George Sanders plays the mule headed Captain Robert Adams of the ill-fated liner who is killed by a falling smoke stack. Robert Stack heads the cast as Cliff Henderson who tries to rescue his wife Laurie (Dorothy Maone) and their daughter Jill from certain death (she was played by an adorable Tammy Marihugh who was one of the best child actresses from the 1960s). The Henderson family is aided and abetted by the ship's stoker Hank Lawson (played by Woody Strode). There's also an explosion that punches a hole in the Claridon's hull, thus causing the ship to sink. Andrew Stone wrote the screenplay and his wife Virginia served as editor. THE LAST VOYAGE reunited Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, who had been in WRITTEN IN THE WIND (1957). There is plenty of white-knuckled suspense all the way. Two of the cast members, George Furness and Andrew Hughes, appeared in quite a few Japanese-made movies; they played Occidental characters, of course. THE LAST VOYAGE received an Oscar nomination in the Best Special Effects category, for the special effects and pyrotechnics supervised by Augie Lohman. It lost to another MGM feature, THE TIME MACHINE. Can you handle 91 minutes of pure suspense? Find out for yourself.