You couldn't make it up, they say, but someone has - Robert Redford maintains a single wooden expression throughout the film, there is no dialogue, he is either on a yacht (or briefly over the side) or in a rather squishy liferaft throughout, and things just go on getting worse. Not a brilliant recipe for a movie, though the fish in the underwater shots upstage the entire surface action with some terrific formation swimming!
The mixture of continuity errors and 1950s special effects destroys such tenuous narrative as is present, and any audience sympathy is less for Redford's desperate plight than for his misfortune in having been cast in the film at all, especially as hardly a moment goes by before he's getting soaked again!
Redford's character is so laughably bad at sailing his boat it is no surprise he hits a very visible container in calm conditions in the middle of an ocean – and that's at the beginning! He then omits to bail the boat out after it is holed and, for the moment, repaired, and engages in a battle with a stubborn foresail which, no sooner lowered, is seen back furled on the forestay – annoying or what?
The first we know of the holing is water coming in from under the forward bunk, though that issue is never addressed, and the only hole turns out in fact to be handily above the chart-table! Swept overboard by a wave at one point, he climbs nimbly back up the side and over the rail in full waterproofs, at which moment we notice he is clipped on to the guardrail! He is equally fortunate in his sextant use: retrieving the box from under water on board, he apparently learns how to use the perfectly dry sextant in no time at all, though all he does is vaguely point it at the horizon and then consult equally pristine sight reduction tables before marking the chart (in biro!) without using dividers or parallel rule. In order to do this he also somehow manages to find a clean dry shirt to wear!
I suppose the sprayhood would have been in the way of the camera, but the number of times he leaves the hatch open would have sunk the boat, though it is, mercifully, closed for the obligatory knockdown which removes his mast, in a back-projected storm clearly borrowed from 'Master and Commander' - that nautico-cinematic masterpiece which has square-rigged warships chasing each other, sails aback, under engine!
Redford's stony expression is variously directed towards the interior of his boat, the horizon, gathering clouds – his thought process is limpid, seeming to consist of the one word which he finally releases, instantly nailing the coveted 'most over-acted moment ever in a liferaft' award.
By the time he has set fire to his liferaft trying to attract attention, we realise that he is the disaster at the heart of this disastrous movie, which is at the cinema in Weymouth until it too goes down to rest on the bottom with all those other sailing films. Is it really that difficult to get it right?
I can't wait for the DVD showing at the club!
Steve Fraser
Submitted on 20th January 2014