ABANDON SHIP!
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: This is the story of an overcrowded lifeboat. It is a good treatment of the hard decision between being humanitarian and risking killing everyone on the lifeboat or being crueller but more realistic. This film tells more about the nature of disaster and how people react to it than all the disaster films Irwin Allen ever made.
In my review of the film ALIENS, I said that one of the reasons it was not as good as ALIEN was that it introduced a weak and sympathetic character. There is an unwritten romantic code in horror and disaster films that says that most women and children, particularly the appealing ones, are safe. In THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE there are a lot of people who start the journey to safety and one by one the strong characters die off. Carol Lynley and two children survive, if I remember right. I think everyone loves to see the weak survive but nobody really believes it. I guess it is just a cinematic convention.
I just saw on cable (from Atlanta) the 1957 film ABANDON SHIP! (Oddly enough I had never heard of it until very recently and I think someone described it to me just about a week or so ago.) This is the story of a very overcrowded lifeboat and the captain who really has to make some hard decisions about who is going to live and who is going to die. These decisions are based on logic, not on what will play well to an audience. The film covers topics often reserved for post-holocaust films--and often side-stepped even there. In specific, there are questions of triage. No medical supplies can be wasted on those who are too sick or disabled to continue.
There are two or three nice ironic twists at the end of the film and the revelation that this is a true story, which perhaps accounts for why it seems so believable. The film is the real stuff.
I should mention the film stars Tyrone Power and a host of faces familiar from British films and TV. And, let us face it, I love just about any film that has two warring factions, both of which seem right. ABANDON SHIP! (British title: SEVEN WAVES AWAY) is just about the most thought- provoking disaster film I can imagine. Rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper
mtgzz!leeper@rutgers.rutgers.edu
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