...as the studio had floated this one as their big Oscar-bait of the year before it pretty much dropped off the face of the earth, and it's easy to see why--For the first hour, in the story of a thousand 1939 German refugees relocated to Cuba as a propaganda stunt, we get so many of the standard "Wartime passengers of destiny" subplots, those who didn't know their history would think it was a rewritten Titanic epic, and the ship was going to sink. The story, of course, is that a corrupt, bureaucratic Cuba didn't want them, a 30's isolationist US wouldn't take them, and the doomed passengers might ultimately be sent back to Germany. That should be drama but it's oddly uninvolving--Compared to the less realistic Wartime Passengers of Destiny in Robert Wise's The Hindenburg that same year, that one had a better feel for prewar tensions hiding in luxury class..."Hindenburg" made you dream of traveling on luxury zeppelin, "Voyage" just makes you feel like you're on a long trip with a rude staff.

Director Stuart Rosenberg plays the Jewish-history angle too subjectively, since he acts as if the audience is already on his side from the beginning, like "Schindler's List Goes to Havana". 70's-era Faye Dunaway plays her usual ruthless hysterics, Max Von Sydow is the sympathetic ship captain, and Ben Gazzara gets the noble speeches as the government representative, but most of it falls apart in the over-the-top climaxes. Malcolm McDowell looks a bit confused at having to play a good character as a teen steward who finds romance (when he helps foil a German-intelligence ploy, watch the Alex deLarge bad-boy come back out again) . Orson Welles shows up as a Cuban bureaucrat, but with his strange 70's-Welles delivery, you're genuinely not sure whether he's trying for "casual raconteur", or whether he's befuddled by his own lines because he was at the career point where he couldn't remember them anymore.

Based on a true story. In 1939, 1937 German-Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany are bound for Cuba and asylum. Before reaching Cuba the ship is refused permission to dock and all visas revoked. After being told they could not dock anywhere else, the S.S. St. Louis must turn around and head back to Germany and certain death for its passengers. The captain(Max von Sydow)wants to fake a shipwreck off the coast of England, but another solution arises.

A tremendous all-star cast features:Faye Dunaway, Oskar Werner, Lee Grant, Jose Ferrer, Katherine Ross, Orson Welles, Lynne Frederick, Ben Gazzara, James Mason, Victor Spinetti and Malcolm McDowell. I was most impressed with Ross and Frederick. This film can bring on mild depression, but hope does win out in the end. I liked the finale showing important characters and their fate.