The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959)

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

The opening 40 minutes or so of this film are fantastic. Cooper and Heston are excellent. The sets and special effects are extraordinarily good and exceptionally realistic for the era and everyone should be gripped by this point. We then move to the first and most crippling thorn in the side of this film, Richard Harris. His role is small but important and played with all the subtlety of a lead balloon. With an accent that varies from brummie to cockney to South African (but is defiantly never Irish), he dominates every scene in which he appears in a way that - thanks to his acting - his character somehow never quite manages. We then move to what should appear to be a gripping peak, Cooper's day in court. This is a critical part of the story, but minor sub-plots, instead of being used to build up or sustain the tension, instead provide distractions and disperse much of the energy. The court case which is deliberately anti-climactic should serve to drive the momentum of the story forward, but comes across as a sort of ineffectual interlude until we are allowed to return to the drama of the final reel. Here again all is fine and things begin to build up again until Harris is required to take the menace and terror up a further notch. He fails. There is drama, but it's nothing to what it might have been. The film closes with a nondescript scene tying up loose ends and includes the line "I think perhaps there will be serious charges against the owners in London". Well gosh, really!

***SPOILERS*** Seeing this cargo ship on fire and adrift in the stormy English Channel salvage tugboat Captain of the "Sea Witch" John Sands, Charlton Heston, decided to get on board and investigate to see if anyone is still alive on the boat. To his shock and amazement Sands is attacked, from out of nowhere, by this wild eyed and hysterical man who claims that he's the ship's only survivor! The what seemed like crazy man turned out to be the ship's third mate Gideon Patch, Cary Cooper,and the ship he's now in charge of is the "Mary Deare".Wih the "Mary Deare" taking on water and Sands stranded on it it's now up to Patch to steer it to the safely of the nearest French port. For some strange reason Patch beaches the "Mary Deare" on the treacherous Minquiers, or Minkies in English, coral reef off the Channel Islands! Patch is keeping what he knows about the "Mary Deare" secret planning to reveal what he knows at a naval court of inquiry. What's even more bizarre about Patch's actions he want's the totally ignorant Sands, who just went along for the ride, to play along with him! Even if by doing that would cost him his master ticket to be a ship captain! As we, and Sands, later find out there is a method to Patch's madness in his paranoia of what the purpose behind the "Mary Deare" string of accident that started when it left port in Rangoon Burma. ***SPOILERS***It secretly switched its cargo of jet aircraft engines to another cargo ship docked there. That ship just happened to belong to the Peoples Republic of Communist Red China!Patch knows that as long as the "Mary Deare" remains in tact he can prove that there was a plan by it's owner Grunderson, Peter Illing, to sell its cargo of airplane engines to the Communist Red Chinese and then have the ship sunk by a series of staged accidents by it's officer in charge Captain Taggart. The fact that Patch prevented that from happening has put him on the hot seat for being an incompetent sea captain as well as a possible accomplice, in Captain Taggart's mysterious death, to murder. The only way he can clear his name is have the ship-the "Mary Deare- checked for its cargo that which Patch, by having it stranded on the Minkies, has everyone thinking that it's at the bottom of the English Channel. By having the ship being investigated by a naval board of inquiry would prevent Grunderson's paid off goons lead by Higgins, Richard Harris, from making sure that it, and its missing cargo of jet engines, never get to see the light of day!P.S Even though at first intimidated by his co-star in the film Gary Cooper, whom he idolized, Charlton Heston held his own and in some scenes even eclipsed the legendary two time Academy Award winning actor. The movie turned out to be one of the last films the great Gary Cooper would ever make. Not knowing it at the time Gary Cooper was suffering from the early stages of terminal cancer that would eventually take his life two years later in May 1961 at the age of 60.

The Wreck of the Mary Deare, is an exciting piece of cinema. Although not a masterpiece and it was clear no Oscars were going to be won here, we are with all presented with a classic yarn that has a montage of rich ingredients.The first forty minutes of the film is pure unadulterated peril on the high seas as salvage man John Sands (Charlton Heston) boards the apparently derelict "Mary Deare" during a massive storm in the English Channel.On investigation Sands finds that part of the ship has been burnt out and gutted and the entire crew have abandoned ship. Just as Sands is about to take his new prize in tow, Acting Captain Gideon Patch (Gary Cooper) appears, the one crew member to stay behind, put out the fires and fight the "Mary Deare" through the rough seas to safety.However it becomes clear to Sands, that reaching port is the last thing on Patch's mind as he purposely steers and beaches the ship onto the Minquieries, a plateau of deadly rocks - "a ships graveyard" Patch assures the confused Sands that this self destruction of his ship was done for a specific reason and begs Sands not to give away her final position until an official court of enquiry.Sands and Patch are eventually picked up and are met on shore by a gaggle of police and maritime insurance agents desperate to know the final fate of the "Mary Deare" and a rescued crew with an altogether different version of events of the one that Patch himself tells.Sly second Officer Higgins, brilliantly portrayed by the great Richard Harris tells of Patch's poor seamanship since assuming command and his panic at the fire and the rushed decision to abandon ship which has caused the death of so many of the crew.Sands then questions whether he has 'backed the right horse' especially as Captain Patch already has a reputation for 'losing ships' in the past. However he stays true to his word and fails to divulge the valuable information he holds on the final resting place of the "Mary Deare" There follows a maritime court of enquiry where after days of restraint, Patch is able to speak his piece and put the cat amongst the pigeons. Patchs testimony tells of how the ships fire and the evacuation was orchestrated by the "Mary Deares" owners and carried out by Higgins and other unscrupulous members of the crew, so that they can claim not only against the loss of the ship but also it's valuable cargo. However Patch is convinced and can provide the necessary evidence to prove that the real cargo had already been offloaded at Rangoon and replaced with crates of stone.This evidence is the substituted cargo itself, now secured in number three hold of the "Mary Deare". This he explains is why he beached the ship on The Minquieries, so she will lie in shallow enough water for the hold and the aforementioned crates to be officially examined thereby proving the deception. But when his calls for an official examination fall on deaf ears he and Sands take matters into their own hands and venture out to the "Mary Deare" to supply the said evidence themselves.Also Minquieries bound is the desperate Higgins, under orders from the the equally desperate owners to finally sink the tell-tale ship and silence Patch forever into the bargain.Can Sands and Patch prove the truth before Higgins and Co, or the ships final plummet into the murky depths take their lives? With notable support from Micheal Redgrave, Alexander Knox and Virginia McKenna, it is really an exciting couple of hours worth of cinema. From the high sea adventure through the courtroom drama to the typical finale of the good guys meeting the bad guys, The Wreck of the Mary Deare stands up as a good old fashioned ripping yarn.

I realize that great special effects shouldn't make or break a movie, and they don't here, but they ARE really terrific. The shipwreck scenes in the beginning of the film are not only great for 1958, they're great by today's standards too. I'd love to see a making of documentary. I'm so bored with the special effects "making of" docs of today. It's always that everything was first shot against a green screen, and then come the interviews with the SPX guys telling you what they did and how hard it was to do. "Yep, we just programmed the computer and went for coffee while it rendered the action". Yeah, really impressive. No computer here. This is the true essence of what used to be a CRAFT. Albeit scaled down, everything you see here on the screen actually existed in real life and not in cyberspace. I don't know if anyone will ever read this, or even care to compare, but watch the similar ship scenes in the newer version of King Kong and then compare them to what was done here almost 50 years sooner. IMHO, the scenes in the 2005 "King Kong" look more like a very realistic cartoon! Same thing with this years "Flyboys". The dogfights had a lot of great "camera" angles and thrilling sequences, but nowhere near as thrilling as done almost 80 years before for "Wings". And besides, that cartoon look clashes with the live action stuff. Yes, NOT using a computer WOULD have made things harder for the "Flyboys" and "Kong" crews, but if they're really any good they would have come up with better results! That's why the director of "The Fugitive" crashed a REAL train for the film rather than stoke up the computer chips. You really want real, you have to have real in there someplace! I really think that the film industry has it backwards. Huge budget films should spend all that money on the harder to do but more satisfying "hand crafted" SFX and leave the computer generated junk for the low budget flicks.