edalweber This movie has some spectacular scenes but too much about it makes no sense.Why should the captain be so obcessed about making a record trip in a ship headed for the scrap heap? And all the things in the boiler room that were defective, no matter how old the ship was or what was its intended fate, passenger ships were carefully inspected before each voyage, No inspector would have failed to make sure something as critical as a steam gage or safety valve was working. That kind of thing was constantly checked.Nor would an engineer in charge have to worry about begging a higher up for taking action immediately.He would have immediately cut off the fuel oil supply to all boilers to reduce pressure until he had checked everything out.Nobody in this thing uses the least common sense.And as far as the woman trapped, the sensible thing,AGAIN" would be to round up some strong male passengers to help.get a heavy beam or oron bar to use as a lever, with something to use as shims to prevent the wall from falling back down as pressure was released.FIRST clearing all the depris out of the room so you could see what you were doing,you could have leavered the wall clear in a fraction of the time,far more quickly than bothering with the cutting torch,which could never have cleared things in the few minutes shown.At the time people regarded the trashing of the fine old liner as desecration to make this thing,It is a great pity that no one thought of preserving it as a hotel like the Queen Mary.

Wuchak "The Last Voyage" is an American disaster film written and directed by Andrew L. Stone and released in 1960. Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone star as a couple traveling on the SS Claridon en route to Japan with their Shirley Temple-like daughter. A fire starts in the boiler room and the damage leads to an explosion, which threatens to sink the ship. George Sanders plays the in-denial captain who thinks his ship is unsinkable and Woody Strode a crewmember who assists the couple. There are similarities in the story to the sinking of the SS Andria Doria, which sank four years earlier.The trailer advertised the film as "91 minutes of the most intense suspense in motion picture history" and it's actually not far from the truth (up to that time) as this is a very suspenseful film from beginning to end. Another plus is that they didn't use conventional sets and special effects; the movie's shot on a real ship, the French luxury liner SS Ile de France, which was scheduled to be scrapped before Stone rented it for $1.5 million. The vessel was partially sunk in shallow waters and the crashing of the towering funnel into the deckhouse is for real.Despite these impressive elements the film lost half a million at the box office and fails to break the threshold of greatness like 1972's "The Poseidon Adventure" and 1997's "Titanic." It's more consistently suspenseful from beginning to end, but this reveals its weakness: The film lacks the establishment of characters of those other films, which isn't to say there aren't parts of mounting anticipation. Nevertheless, instead of a great build-up to disaster it's more of an even-keel of suspense.Moreover, "The Last Voyage" lacks the deeper subtext of those more popular sinking-ship films. Whereas "The Poseidon Adventure" potently addresses the universal question "Why does a righteous God allow tragedy and death?" and "Titanic" explores the corruption of wealth and the unbiased idealism of youth, "The Last Voyage" is simply a movie about a sinking ship and the people trying to survive. Of course, it doesn't HAVE to be anything more than this and it's very good in its old fashioned way, but this one-dimensional approach also hinders it from greatness. However, the inclusion of likable Woody Strode in a prominent role well before the Civil Rights movement is indeed praiseworthy.The film runs 91 minutes and was shot in Sea of Japan off the coast of Osaka, although the final lifeboat scene was filmed in Santa Monica, California due to the poisonous jellyfish in the Japanese waters.GRADE: B

evening1 This early disaster movie is dated and hackneyed but it manages to build to a suspenseful conclusion.What would you do in a similar situation -- drown with your spouse or jump aboard a lifeboat so your only child wouldn't become an orphan? This movie was striking for the moral dilemmas that it raised; I watched it with my 8-year-old son and it was interesting for us to weigh these questions together.Yet "The Last Voyage" is full of clichés and weirdness. How preternaturally happy the central couple seemed together before the crisis hit -- I didn't believe that a married couple would act this mutually bewitched. Their daughter struck me as a mini-adult in a child's body -- her screeches were so uncharacteristic of a young girl that I wished she would slip as she blubberingly crossed a plank over an abyss. And how anachronistically odd to see the only black person on board appearing bare-chested throughout, as if he were a modern incarnation of Melville's Queequeg.The film's conclusion was suspenseful and somewhat moving despite my conviction throughout that this movie would end happily. Various illogicalities jarred along the way -- how 'bout that wife appearing glamorous throughout her ordeal? And how the hell can she stand on her own just moments after being cut from the debris? Despite such quibbles, this movie kept my interest.

U.N. Owen In their second teaming in 4 years (Ms. Malone & Mr. Stack had previously been paired on the WONDERFUL Douglas Sirk film WRITTEN ON THE WIND), Dorothy and Robert play husband and wife, traveling to Asia aboard the ill-fated S. S. Claridon ( a re-dressed Ile de France) along with their red-headed moppet.As fate would have it - the Claridon's boilers blow up - Ms. Malone's trapped by the rubble, and the ship's going down. Can Robert Stack save his wife? The big draw of this film was the actual destruction of the Ile de France as the S. S. Claridon. In this day and age, where we're so used to seeing things on huge scale being destroyed (the 'cousin' of THE LAST VOYAGE - TITANIC, was the first big budget film to rely HEAVILY on CGI for it's boat's destruction), it gives one a sense of the 'real,' knowing that while what your watching is staged - it IS REAL. This boat IS gonna go down (as is pointed out in the trivia area, after filming The France was re-floated and shipped off for scrap - sigh!).I'm a sucker for ANYTHING with Dorothy Malone. Any 'disaster' she's in - I'm there (I wish she was better acknowledged - especially given that Ms. Malone's STILL with us, thank goodness!). Given that this film is a 'disaster' flick before the Irwin Allen pictures of the early 70's (Earthquake,The Poseidon Adventure, et al.), this film is always a pleasure to watch, and given the large number of reviews posted the past day or so (it was just on TCM), I see I'm not alone.Grab the popcorn, and forget wearing a life-jacket - even though this ship's sinking - this film isn't.