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Thursday, June 4, 2020

ABANDON SHIP! (1957)

(AKA: SEVEN DAYS FROM NOW; SEVEN WAVES AWAY) Tidy survival-of-the-fittest lifeboat drama with a rejuvenated Tyrone Power* triaging from 26 desperate souls to a mere dozen on a small craft designed for nine. Even with brutal life-or-death decisions, getting down to an overloaded 12 requires steely/heartless resolve, but how else to save any of them? Especially with a storm rising, no S.O.S. sent from the ship and land 1500 miles away? Journeyman director Richard Sale husbands his modest budget with the same sort of brutal tactics Power uses, getting fine work from his cast (Marie Lohr as a retired opera singer & Stephen Boyd as a compassionate ship officer particularly good) and not dwelling too longingly on necessary cruelties. But are they necessary? That’s the question being asked as Power works thru Nietzchean superman challenges. Heroic necessity or self-preservating villain? You decide.

DOUBLE-BILL: Hitchcock brings similar ideas & filming techniques, plus far more enjoyable dramatic fillips, to LIFEBOAT/’44, a WWII allegory with Walter Slezak’s Nazi villain in the Nietzchean superman spot. What a difference a decade makes! OR: Andrew Stone is all about the sinking and nothing else in his shipshape THE LAST VOYAGE/’60.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Dead at 44, a year after this film, Power’s youthful dazzle waned alarmingly in the ‘50s. But he seems to have dropped a decade here. Swimming for his life in the ocean, you presume it’s no trick of makeup, nor helpful b&w lensing. He’s dreary & worn in WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION later this year and a Color by Deluxe blank in THE SUN ALSO RISES. Here, his puppyish revival a mystery, but a happy one.

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