New Picture

The Last Voyage (M-G-M). "Fire in the engine room!" These are the first words in this film, the first jab of what turns out to be the most violently overstimulating experience of the new year in cinema: an attempt by two shrewd shock merchants, Andrew and Virginia Stone (Julie, Cry Terror!) to give the mass audience a continuous, 91-minute injection of adrenaline.

The captain (George Sanders) of the liner Claridon, several days at sea with 1,500 passengers aboard, is not alarmed by the news of the fire, and fortune at first seems to smile on his sangfroid. The blaze is quickly put out. But its heat has fused the safety valve of the No. 3 boiler, which eventually blows its top through third, second and first-class cabins and rips a sizable hole in the side of the ship. The captain orders the lifeboats lowered, and as bulkhead after bulkhead bursts, he makes his desperate calculations: in 50 minutes the Claridon will take the fatal plunge.

At this point the suspense, already throat-constricting, becomes anginal. The explosion has trapped the heroine (Dorothy Malone) beneath a steel frame too heavy to move. Only an acetylene torch can save her. Can the hero (Robert Stack), raging through the sinking ship, find a torch before the rising waters drown the heroine's piteous cries? No he can't; yes he can; no he can't. The Stones play on the moviegoer's pulse as though it were a set of bongos.

As a piece of professional entertainment, The Last Voyage is plainly superior to the picture it was patterned after, the British version of the loss of the Titanic. The script takes advantage of its fictional freedom, as the script of A Night to Remember (TIME, Jan. 5, 1959) could not, to focus its interest and excite its pace. The scenes of destruction are particularly explicit and dramatic: most of the film was shot aboard the old Ile de France just before she was junked in Japan. And yet, in its total effect, The Last Voyage lacks an element essential in all great disasters: dignity. Indeed, the idle depredation of a noble old ship, for the mere sake of salable sensation, may seem to some moviegoers an absolute indignity.

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