Voyage of the Damned (1976) Review

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 would be repudiated, and the German government permitted and encouraged the voyage precisely 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.

The 7 is for an important film made in the prestige style of its decade, which means an enormous cast, a stately pace, and a decorum the subject does not deserve. The facts are handled honestly, the central situation needs no help, and the framing is more tasteful than the material warrants.

A Voyage Designed to Fail

This is the part that makes the story unbearable and the film states it clearly, which is to its credit.

The sailing was propaganda. The Reich expected the refusals and wanted them documented, because a world that would not 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 is 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 cannot be admitted, each of them working within rules they did not write.

The Ship as a Waiting Room

The passengers spend the film unable to act. They cannot land, cannot go back, and cannot influence any of the decisions being made about them in Havana, Washington and Berlin.

That is 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 do not. 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 is also a passenger committee, which is the film’s most quietly awful thread. A group of men negotiating on behalf of the rest, with nothing to bargain with, producing lists and proposals that nobody ashore will read.

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, which reads as relief.

It is not relief. Most of those countries were occupied within a year, and a substantial 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 lands like a trapdoor. The rescue was real and it was temporary, and the temporariness was not 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 is also the only place it uses the device.

The historical record on the American refusal is worse than the film suggests. There was a petition, there was press coverage, and the decision was made with full knowledge of what was being refused.

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

The film is respectable in a way that works against it, and the mid-seventies had a specific 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 is 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 is all five minutes allows.

The score is lush where it should be absent, the lighting is handsome where it should be plain, and there is a general sense of the film treating the subject respectfully instead of directly.

It was nominated for three Academy Awards and won none, which is about right, and it has 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 was not 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 is a story in which the United States, Canada and Cuba all behaved badly toward people who were subsequently murdered, and nobody involved had an interest in commemorating it.

The Johnson-Reed Act quotas were the legal mechanism and they were not 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 is 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, which is worth remembering when judging a piece of work that now looks stately and slow.

Should you watch Voyage of the Damned?

Yes, if you can accept the pace and the prestige gloss. The negotiation scenes are the reason, 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.

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