Seven Waves Away

Tyrone Power is today's star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, and to be honest I've actually blogged about quite a few of the movies being shown. One I hadn't blogged about is Abandon Ship (as the movie is titled on the print TCM ran the last time they ran it; the original title is apparently Seven Waves Away and it's also known as Seven Days from Now), which concludes Power's day at 4:00 AM Monday, so early Monday or overnight tonight depending on your preference. I had recorded it when TCM did a spotlight on "Movies at Sea", and with the upcoming airing I recently watched it to do a post on here.

The movie starts off with the opening credits being superimposed over the images of first brochures for a luxury around the world cruse followed a naval mine, so it's obvious that something ominous is about to happen even if you couldn't figure this out from the title Abandon Ship. Sure enough, as the credits are ending we get an explosion with the ship Crescent Star having hit the mine and about to go under.

Alec Holmes (Tyrone Power) is an officer on the ship, and got off the ship, which went down so quickly that there wasn't time for any of the lifeboats to be filled and set off from the ship. There's a lot of flotsam, however, and Alec is able to get aboard one piece of flotsam that has another couple of stranded passengers. And then -- Holmes spots a lifeboat off in the distance!

Alec swims over to it, and finds that it isn't a normal lifeboat, but a smaller one that's only designed to hold nine people. However, so many people were desperate to get off the Crescent Star, and this was the only boat we see, that it's severely overloaded, even having a bunch of men having to hang off the side of the boat holding on to ropes and having a life preserver around them. Adding one more person to the boad is like adding insult to injury, even if Holmes is an officer.

If that's not bad enough, there are a lot of problems aboard this tiny lifeboat, starting with the captain's presence. OK, it's not the captain's presence that's a problem, but the fact that the captain was mortally wounded in the explosion. Despite the fact that the ship's nurse, Julie White (Mai Zetterling) is on board, he's beyond treatment, as are several other of the people in the boat. Soon enough the captain does die and Holmes, being senior among the officers left on the boat, is given command.

This doesn't sit will with several of the others, since this is Holmes' first command. There's a junior officer, McKinley (Stephen Boyd); a retired general who has commanded, if only on land; and a glamorous-looking woman, Edith Middeton (Moira Lister), who keeps referring derisively to Holmes as "brave captain". And the nurse is Holmes' old girlfriend, which adds some more tension. Fortunately, though, there was another ship in the area. Except that Sparks tells us the explosion hit so quickly and destroyed the radio equipment before they had a chance to send out an SOS call. Oops.

So with nothing else to do, Holmes comes up with the brilliant idea of trying to have the men row to get the boat into a current that will take them to Africa, which is the nearest attainable landfall although that's 1500 miles away and will take them 15 days if they're lucky. The rations were only designed for nine, and even with people having died there's still way too many people on board, forcing Holmes to make some extremely difficult decisions.

I've made the argument in conjunction with several submarine movies that there are only so many ways to go because of the extremely confined spaces. I'd say that the same is true with Abandon Ship, considering how tiny the lifeboat is. I unsurprisingly found myself thinking of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat. I think that movie has the advantage of having fewer characters, as well as having Walter Slezak play a Nazi which brings up some severe dramatic tension. Abandon Ship doesn't have that, resulting in a movie that's a bit more of a one-note storyline.

Not that Abandon Ship is a bad movie, especially when the movie tells us at the end that it's actually based on a true story (apparently from 100 years earlier, if IMDb's trivia section is to be believed). Power does well and is more than the 40s swashbuckler. The movie raises some thought-provoking ideas, but unfortunately doesn't do much more than that.