Ferry to Hong Kong ** (1959, Curd Jürgens, Orson Welles, Sylvia Syms, Jeremy Spenser, Noel Purcell) – Classic Movie Review 6752

‘It was my nightmare film. It was a dreadful film, and everything was wrong with it, principally Welles.’

Hooray for Curt Jurgens [Curd Jürgens] and Orson Welles, who have a field day hamming it up as, respectively, Mark Conrad, a decent but drunken Austrian exile, and Captain Hart, the puffed-up English ferryboat skipper, both embroiled in trying to save the ship from pirates and a typhoon.

After a bar fight, Conrad is expelled from Hong Kong by police on Hart’s ferry, the Fa Tsan. But Macao won’t admit Conrad, who is stuck the ferry with Hart, who hates him. Then the typhoon and pirates breeze into the plot.

Otherwise, apart from Jürgens and Welles, British film studio The Rank Organisation’s late-Fifties dip into the muddied waters of transatlantic film-making – no doubt a failed attempt to come up with another The African Queen – is a slow, routine journey that only really gets going when audiences have switched off.

Unfortunately, esteemed director and co-writer Lewis Gilbert must be held to largely blame for an unconvincing and non-compelling story based on the novel by Max Catto in a movie that hovers uncertainly between comedy and melodrama.

Gilbert recalled that Ferry to Hong Kong was dreadful. ‘It was my nightmare film. It was a dreadful film, and everything was wrong with it, principally Welles.’

Welles enjoys himself mugging and producing laughs in a daft English accent. It isn’t exactly a truthful or good performance but it is entertaining in its rough acting kind of way. On reflection, Gilbert may not be to blame after all. Some films are just nightmare films and don’t work out they way they are planned.

Sylvia Syms co-stars as Liz Ferrers, the schoolmarm who pals up with Jürgens’s Conrad. Syms popped up 30 years later in Gilbert’s Shirley Valentine.

Also in the cast are Jeremy Spenser, Noel Purcell, Margaret Withers, John Wallace, Roy Chiao, Shelley Shen, Milton Reid, Louis Seto, Ronald Decent, Milton Reid, Don Carlos, Nick Kendall and Kwan Shan Lam [Kwan-San Lam].

Ferry to Hong Kong is directed by Lewis Gilbert, runs 103 minutes, is written by Vernon Harris, Lewis Gilbert (screenplay) and John Mortimer (additional dialogue), is shot in widescreen and Eastman Color by Otto Heller, is produced by Earl St John and George Maynard, is scored by Kenneth V Jones and designed by John Stoll.

Rank replaced Peter Finch with Curd Jürgens, thinking Finch’s appeal had declined.

RIP Lewis Gilbert (1920–2018), among the best of the best.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6752

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com