04 Jan Voyage of the Damned
Voyage of the Damned, WWII Movie starring Faye Dunaway
(1976) I knew how it was going to end. That didn’t keep me from being interested in every bit of this movie, based on a 1974 book of the same name by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts.
The MS St. Louis departs Hamburg on May 13, 1939, for Havana with over 900 Jewish passengers, all intent on escaping Hitler’s Germany. In the movie, we see that this is a propaganda plot hatched by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. It is never intended for the passengers to disembark in Cuba. Goebbels wants to show the world that no one else wants them either.
The first class passengers are wined and dined and danced. There is even a masked ball. Our hero is Captain Schroeder who is determined to deliver his charges to safety and never succumbs to the Nazi line.
The star-studded cast includes Faye Dunaway, Lee Grant, Max Von Sydow, Ben Gazzara, Katherine Ross, Julie Harris, José Ferrer, Orson Welles, James Mason, and Oskar Werner, whom I recognized immediately as the German POW in Decision Before Dawn.
At the closing of the film, we hear that, finally, passengers are given permission to enter England, Belgium, Holland and France. They clap when they hear the news, but two years later the war breaks out. “Of the 937 passengers, over 600 died in Nazi concentration camps.”
The ship was destroyed by allied bombs in Hamburg in 1944.
Voyage of the Damned on amazon.com
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