Voyage of the Damned

I have been giving you the impression that all I watch are crappy horror films, haven't I?

Well, I don't. I give you Voyage of the Damned.

This is a wonderfully made, very dense two-and-a-half drama starring, well, everyone. You have Faye Dunaway, Oskar Werner, Malcolm McDowell, Max von Sydow, Maria Schell, Ben Gazzara, James Mason, and - in a minor role - Orson Fucking Welles.

The story is based on an actual (very lavish) journey of the SS St. Louis that carried more than 900 Jewish passengers to Cuba, visas and all, where they were hoping to escape the terror of the Nazis and WW II. When arriving at Havana, they were suddenly refused entry - seemingly on the president's whim. After hovering a few hundred feet off shore, the ship was instructed to leave and the passengers were subsequently also refused entry to the US and started to return towards Germany.

During what appeared to be a happy ending, a handful of other European countries agreed to take the refugees in. The sad truth of the individual stories were given in one of the classic "what happened to ---- after the film ended" we learned of a few survival stories. Ultimately, about 600 of them didn't make it through WW II.

Sad, so sad.

8/10