Voyage of the Damned (1976) Review
7/10
In May 1939 a liner left Hamburg carrying 937 passengers, almost all of them Jewish, holding Cuban landing certificates. Cuba refused them. The United States refused them. Canada refused them. The ship turned around. It happened. The certificates had been sold knowing they’d be repudiated, and the German government permitted and encouraged the voyage so that the refusals would be public and documented.
Stuart Rosenberg directed, from the book by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, with a cast list that runs to about forty recognizable names. I respect this picture more than I enjoy it. The events are enough to make my blood boil, and I kept wishing the film would drop some of its good manners, lose the lush music and the parade of stars, and just show me the ship.
The 7 is for an important film made in the prestige style of its decade. That means an enormous cast, a stately pace, and a decorum the subject doesn’t deserve. The facts are handled faithfully, the central situation needs no help, and the framing is more tasteful than the material warrants.
A Voyage Designed to Fail
I give the film real credit for stating plainly why the Reich let the ship sail, since that’s what makes the story unbearable.
The sailing was propaganda. The Reich expected the refusals and wanted them documented, because a world that wouldn’t accept Jewish refugees strengthened the argument at home enormously. Goebbels understood the value of the story before the ship left.
So the passengers are cargo in a demonstration. They paid for the tickets, they paid for the worthless certificates, and they were permitted to leave because their expulsion and rejection were both useful. Captain Schroeder, played by Max von Sydow, was a real person and behaved decently throughout. He refused to fly the swastika at dinner, allowed religious services, and eventually considered running the ship aground on the English coast to force a rescue. He was recognized posthumously by Israel as Righteous Among the Nations. The film understands that he’s being used as much as they are, and von Sydow plays him as a man discovering the limits of his own authority a day at a time.
The best scenes are the negotiations. Officials in offices explaining calmly and correctly why 937 people can’t be admitted, each of them working within rules they didn’t write.
Bureaucratic refusal is more frightening on the page than malice, because there’s nobody to argue with and no decision to appeal. Every official in this film is polite, procedurally sound and immovable, and none of them is a villain.
The technique is to give the refusal a reason that’s defensible on its own terms. Cuba has an immigration quota and a corruption scandal. The United States has the Johnson-Reed Act and a State Department applying it. Canada has a director of immigration with discretion and no inclination to use it. Each position is legally coherent.
The test is to write your obstructive character’s justification as though you agreed with it. If the reader can dismiss it as bad faith or stupidity, the helplessness evaporates, because a reader who can identify the villain can imagine defeating them. If the justification holds and the outcome is still monstrous, you’ve written the thing that’s no answer.
The Ship as a Waiting Room
The passengers spend the film unable to act. They can’t land, can’t go back, and can’t influence any of the decisions being made about them in Havana, Washington and Berlin.
That’s a hard dramatic situation. A protagonist with no agency is normally fatal, and the film has 937 of them.
It handles this by focusing on how people behave while waiting. The marriages that hold and the ones that don’t. A man who cuts his wrists and jumps. The professor who continues teaching the children. The decision about whether to tell them anything at all.
The cabin is the only territory anybody controls, and the film keeps returning to those small rooms, where the only available decisions are what to pack, what to say, and what to hope for.
There’s also a passenger committee. That’s the film’s most understated thread, and its most awful. A group of men negotiating on behalf of the rest, with nothing to bargain with, producing lists and proposals that nobody ashore will read.
The committee thread is the part that stays with me. Watching grown men draft careful proposals nobody will ever read is the most helpless feeling in the picture, and I think the film should have given it more room than the romances. Oskar Werner and Faye Dunaway have the strongest of the passenger threads, and Werner is doing something similar to his work in Ship of Fools a decade earlier: a decent man with a condition, who knows the cost of decency.
What Happened Afterward
Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands eventually took the passengers between them after negotiation, and the ship docked at Antwerp. The film ends there. That reads as relief.
It’s not relief. Most of those countries were occupied within a year, and a heavy number of the people saved in 1939 were killed after 1940. The figure is usually given as around a quarter of the passengers. The film puts this in closing text and it opens like a trapdoor. The rescue was real and it was temporary, and the temporariness wasn’t knowable at the time by anybody involved.
That structure, an apparent resolution reversed by a caption, is the most effective thing the film does, and it’s also the only place it uses the device. It knocks the air out of me. I’d rate the film lower without that caption, because it’s the moment the picture stops being tasteful and tells the truth.
The historical record on the American refusal is worse than the film suggests. There was a petition, there was press coverage, and the government made the decision with full knowledge of what it was refusing.
Schroeder was tried after the war, cleared, and lived in obscurity. The passengers’ descendants have documented the voyage extensively since, and the manifest is public.
The Prestige Problem
It’s respectable in a way that works against it, and the mid-seventies had its own version of this: an all-star cast, a serious subject, a stately pace, and a general air of importance.
Faye Dunaway, Oskar Werner, Max von Sydow, Malcolm McDowell, Orson Welles, James Mason, Lee Grant, Katharine Ross, Jose Ferrer, Ben Gazzara, Wendy Hiller. That’s a lot of names and it means most of them have five minutes.
The star casting does the same job it does in the Christie films, making a large cast instantly legible, and it also flattens everybody to one characteristic because that’s all five minutes allows. The score is lush where it should be absent, the lighting is handsome where it should be plain, and the whole film treats the subject respectfully when it should treat it directly. That polish loses me. I’d have stripped out every swelling string and trusted the silence on that deck.
It was nominated for three Academy Awards and won none. That’s about right, and it’s largely disappeared while the events have become better known through other work.
The film’s real value now is that it exists at all. In 1976 the American refusal wasn’t widely discussed, and a mainstream picture stating plainly that the United States turned the ship away was doing something.
Why This Story Was Not Told for Decades
The voyage happened in May and June 1939 and was covered in the American press at the time, and then it largely vanished from public discussion for nearly forty years. Part of that is obvious. It’s a story in which the United States, Canada and Cuba all behaved badly toward people who were later murdered, and nobody involved had an interest in commemorating it.
The Johnson-Reed Act quotas were the legal mechanism and they weren’t secret. A State Department that wished to admit the passengers could have found a route, and the record indicates the will was absent instead of the means.
What changed is that the passengers’ families started documenting it. The manifest is now public, the survivors were traced through the 1990s, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has published the fate of nearly every name on the list. That documentation is why the story is now teachable and it’s also why the film matters less than it did. In 1976 this picture was one of very few places the events were described to a general audience.
The film’s closing text was, for a lot of viewers, the first time they learned any of it. That’s worth remembering when judging a piece of work that now looks stately and slow.
A work’s value is partly a function of when it appeared, and judging it without that context produces confident wrong conclusions. This film looks tasteful and slow now and was, in 1976, the main popular account of an episode most of its audience had never heard of.
The practical implication for anybody writing about neglected material is that being early is a form of contribution independent of quality. The definitive book on a subject is usually not the first one, and the first one is why the definitive one became possible. If you’re choosing between a crowded subject you’d handle well and a neglected one you’d handle adequately, the neglected one is worth more.
The test is to ask what exists on your subject already and who it reached. If The material is documented in specialist sources and unknown to general readers, your job is transmission instead of originality, and a competent accessible account will do more good than a brilliant one that arrives after somebody else has done the same job.
Should you watch Voyage of the Damned?
Yes, if you can accept the pace and the prestige gloss.
I’d give it more than a 7 if it trusted its own material, and less if the negotiation scenes and that closing caption weren’t so strong. The negotiations are the reason to watch, and the closing text is the most effective use of a caption I know of. Read about the actual voyage afterward, because the record is bleaker than the film and the manifest is available.
