Something of a pet charity in my house when I was growing up, because for lovers of sea drama with big storms and dripping atmosphere, it’s a must. Though the actual plot and middle act unfold in plodding fashion, Wreck is essentially nautical noir, and kicks off with a superb sequence in which salvage man Sands (Charlton Heston) boards the apparently derelict Mary Deare during a gale in the English Channel, and finds that she’s been the victim of sabotage. The only crew member on board is the wild-eyed Capt. Gideon Patch (Gary Cooper), the former first officer and now isolated commander, who’s set on a mysterious course of action in trying to save his ship and, subsequently, his reputation.
This sequence, from beginning to end, sustains rich intrigue, from the shadowy corridors of the hull that contains threatening hints of extraordinary violence, to Patch deliberately stranding the Mary Deare upon the Minquieres, a patch of ship-killing rocks in the Channel.
It soon becomes apparent that Patch and the ship have been the victims of a dastardly conspiracy involving insurance fraud and smuggling into Red China (gasp!), but Patch has personal reasons for playing things close to his chest. Once ashore, the film offers some salty evocations of a bygone era’s humdrum maritime life and business about port, but things bog down as Anderson wades through the proceedings of a Court of Inquiry, in which several participants are guilty of incredible idiocy and ignorance (and some stalwart actors like Emlyn Williams, Michael Redgrave, John LeMesurier, and Cecil Parker cash some quick pay-cheques) for the sake of spinning the plot out.
Mary Deare is then by far at its best on the high seas, in sequences mindful of how, on the ocean, even such a well-broken trail so close to home, can be deadly and desolate. The finale, in which Patch and Sands venture back into the wreck to prove their suspicions only to be assaulted by conspirator Higgins (Richard Harris), renews the note of shadowy, abyssal menace. Hitchcock was going to make this for MGM, but after Vertigo’s relative failure, he decided to do North By Northwest instead, so the project was inherited by The Dam Busters journeyman Michael Anderson. Hitchcock, one imagines, would have tightened and intensified the action and the visuals, and dug deeper into the mournful undercurrents of desperate loneliness and guilt that drive the characters, as in Patch’s encounter with the daughter (Virginia McKenna) of the drunkard captain he had to kill.
Nonetheless, this melancholic aspect – common to many of the novels of Hammond Innes, whose work this was based on, despite his being largely dismissed as a quintessential lightweight yarnspinner – is still marked. It helps that the screenplay was written by Eric Ambler, the great crime mystery writer, whose screenplays were reliably good, and the themes here reminiscent of his earlier The October Man script, which also hinged on a hero of doubtful character trying to prove his innocence. As with that film, the angst virtually drips from the screen. This life at sea is seen to have ground up men and families with the same ruthlessness as the Minquieres grind up ships.
Cooper is terrific as Patch, positively vibrating with terse suspicion and anxiety (possibly related to his cancer treatment – this was his second-last film), and Harris, on the make as an up-and-coming star, offers an indelibly insolent, charismatic creep. Heston is okay in one of his rare average Joe parts, and McKenna, that most English rosy of English roses, is appropriately frosty.
