The Extraordinary Seaman (1969)

Now, I had to look this up so I could find out the truth for myself. Otherwise, I'd never believe it.

You know who John Frankenheimer is, right? Award-winning director, the man who gave us such landmark projects as Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, The Train, Seconds and Grand Prix, and such important latter-day efforts as 52 Pick-Up, The Fourth War and Ronin.

He was a big deal, right? Important director, right? Worked with such prestigious names as Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Kirk Douglas and Paul Scofield, right?

I knew it; I knew there couldn't be two John Frankenheimers. I had to be sure, though before I wrote this review.

Why should I pay such close attention to this particular review and to John Frankenheimer? Because apparently something happened to Frankenheimer between the time he gave us some of the most rightly-regarded classics of films and 1969.

I have no idea what that "something" was, whether it was a crisis of confidence, a loss of funding, studio interference or maybe an act of sabotage by someone who hated him. But whatever the case, a project was made with Frankenheimer's name on it that not only couldn't conceivably be compared to his work before, but could very well have been a joke perpetrated on humanity as a whole that humanity just would not fall for.

A joke involving David Niven, Faye Dunaway, Mickey Rooney, Jack Carter and the film debut of Alan Alda.

You've never heard of a John Frankenheimer movie with this cast in it? There's a good reason for that - it never got released.

This is one of those ideas that sounds like a plot for The Producers: Part 2, but it's actually something that happens in Hollywood pretty darned often. A movie will be made that the studio will look at before release and decide (usually quite rightly) that it has no chance of earning back its budget and, as a result, they will withdraw it from release before it has a chance of seeing a movie screen. This is popularly known in the business of film-making as "cutting your losses", and makes sense for studios from a financial and an overall image standpoint.

I could go on and on, naming movies that have fallen victim to this particular axe fall and are persistently collecting dust in a long-forgotten corner of Ye Olde Filme Vault somewhere. The list is long and (semi-) prestigious and contains directors and stars you just might recognize.

In the case of John Frankenheimer, however, here was a director whose work was too important, too inflammatory and too vocal to be silenced. It may have been pulled, in other words, but it was sent out kicking and screaming all the way.

A wartime comedy is nothing new, and many examples have come and gone (The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming, M*A*S*H, Catch-22), but in the instance of this subject matter, never has a World War II comedy seemed so drab, so listless and so inconsequential.

And with a title like The Extraordinary Seaman, you'd expect something different. But not different in the way presented here. Or maybe you would...?

Here we go: During the Second World War, the sole survivors of a battleship bombing wash up on the shores of a barren island off the coast of Fiji and discover the shuddering wreckage of an abandoned World War I gunboat named H.M.S. Curmudgeon. The group's leader, Lieutenant Junior Grade Morton Krim (Alan Alda) comes up the boat's sole inhabitant, Commander John Finchhaven (David Niven), who agrees to give Krim and his crew - Oglethorpe (Mickey Rooney), Toole (Jack Warden) and Lightfoot Star (Manu Tupou) passage to Australia in return for helping make his beached craft seaworthy again. A village raid for engine batteries brings the group a new companion: feisty plantation owner Jennifer Winslow (Faye Dunaway), who offers them aid in return for passage.

Once they reach the open sea, Finchhaven reveals a heretofore relatively well-hidden secret and requests Krim's and Winslow's help to sink a Japanese cruiser.

I know, right? David Niven! This man was an actor's actor's actor! He'd been in some great movies and some sparkling comedies, not the least of which were 1960's Please Don't Eat the Daisies and 1963's The Pink Panther. And Faye Dunaway was a star on the rise; she was fondly remembered already for Bonnie and Clyde and The Thomas Crown Affair and at least shows herself as a lady with an effervescent personality, bright eyes, dazzling smile and handy with a gun, too.

We also get names like Mickey Rooney and Jack Carter - names that just scream comedy - you can't miss with them. Usually.

Then we always have Manu Tupou. Who? Oh yeah, you don't know him. A native of Fiji, he was a big deal there. Well, he was big, anyway. Size-wise. And here he plays an Indian shipmate. An American Indian shipmate named Lightfoot Star. Yeah; a Fiji native playing an American Indian. Guess that's what they call a casting conceit.

Alan Alda had a lot to prove in this case, however. This being his first major movie...okay, that's not true, I guess. He played the part of Charlie Cotchipee in Gone Are The Days!, but at least The Extraordinary Seaman was his first leading role. Okay, wait; that's not true, either. A year prior to this he played George Plimpton in the movie Paper Lion. But this was his first leading role in a war movie. There we go.... So that being the case, Alda needed to give it his all, as it were, in what I'm sure he felt would be a comedy for the ages. One that would stand the test of time, like such smart wartime efforts as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Operation: Petticoat and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? - like that.

Unfortunately that was not a sentiment shared by MGM Studios. And neither was it shared, apparently, by Frankenheimer himself. It seems that a lot of effort went into making sure that there was a lot of unrelated padding stuffed in at random intervals throughout The Extraordinary Seaman to insure that it is something resembling a "full-length" movie. Why bother? Well, it seems that even with the story they had, with Alda stumbling around, sailors and landlubbers alike falling into the drink, trees being pulled down for the sake of trees being pulled down, clumsiness fore and aft and Niven's drunken contributions, this film clocked in around sixty-some minutes long.

Just over an hour.

Not even the basic length of your average Police Academy movie.

Surely MGM Studios couldn't release something so puny in size by so well-regarded a director and have the unmitigated gall to call it a feature film. They paid for a major film, not a minor one. What to do? Well, if you're John Frankenheimer, you apparently go the Edward D. Wood Jr. route and add stock footage. LOTSA stock footage.

Footage of Winston Churchill speeches. Footage of Bess Truman christening a boat. Footage of Adolf Hitler speeches. Footage of lots of 40s celebrities supporting the troops and so forth. Footage of Bess Truman attempting to christen the same boat. Footage of General MacArthur being all patriotic-y. Footage of the same Bess Truman still attempting to christen the same boat. Footage of...well, you get the idea.

Hard to tell if this was part of the book this was all based on, but...yeah, this was based on a book. Phillip Rock wrote the novel "The Extraordinary Seaman" in 1967 and from this base a script was written by Hal Dresner - who himself wrote such movies as The April Fools and The Eiger Sanction. Of course, more to the point of paralleling a movie like The Extraordinary Seaman, Dresner also wrote SSSSSSS and Zorro The Gay Blade.

To his credit, however, at least none of those other of Dresner's scripts had to utilize stock footage from the 1940s.

Now Frankenheimer had a feature-length film. Or at least an eighty minute-long one.

Then the studio head honchos sat down and watched the whole thing.

And...

Well...

They never released it.

Yep, they cut their losses.

I guess I should revise that; MGM did release The Extraordinary Seaman in Uruguay, Colombia, Denmark, Portugal and Sweden. Not the United States, but I guess it makes sense that we should be spared the pain and discomfort of seeing our own citizens debase themselves for 80 minutes (minus the stock footage).

Any movie can be bad. The worst sin committed by The Extraordinary Seaman is that it barely even tries. This could have been so much better if everyone involved just put forth a little more effort. If Frankenheimer would have shown the flair and creativity everyone knew he had in him. If David Niven had allowed himself to become more a part of the proceedings rather than to sit and drink whiskey for his entire character motivation. If Alda, Dunaway and company tried to aim their acting above the script instead of below it. If Rooney and Carter made with the ad-libbing and riffing off of the bad lines supplied them.

But they didn't. All the sadder.

In the end, it's no wonder the only way anyone ever heard of The Extraordinary Seaman was if they saw a "Coming Soon" poster at their local theaters for this movie which never came or if they, like me, read about it in Chapter 26 - The Worst Film You Never Saw - of the Harry and Michael Medved bible of such things, "The Golden Turkey Awards".

I kinda doubt this made any money. Yeah, in spite of the director, in spite of the cast, in spite of the stock footage, in spite of the fact that there is an audience for films as bad as this one, if given the chance to seek it out.

Everyone involved with The Extraordinary Seaman moved on, including Frankenheimer. Sort of. Oh, he went on to direct good films, to be sure. But he also ended up directing films like 99 and 44/100% Dead, French Connection II, Prophecy, The Holcroft Covenant, Dead Bang, 1996's The Island Of Dr. Moreau and Reindeer Games, all of which did nothing to make people believe that even directors the stature of Frankenheimer are completely infallible. Or that they learn from their own mistakes.

Or maybe he did; at least Frankenheimer never did direct another film that combined Adolf Hitler, Gregory Peck and Bess Truman trying to christen a boat.

He DID direct Marlon Brando in a muumuu, though. So much for learning anything....