This film isn't as dire as the one-star reviews claim. That said, it isn't very good either. It's just...odd and doesn't really go anywhere.David Niven is his urbane, David Niveny self as a sort of British version of The Flying Dutchman who has to redeem himself through an act of war-time valor instead of an act of love. Alan Alda is Alan Alda. Faye Dunaway is the girl with moxie (sporting 1960's hair-dos during WW2). Mickey Rooney has very little to do. The conceit of inserting old newsreel footage into the film didn't bother me, I thought the clips were interesting.I did learn two things while watching this;1) I had forgotten the difference between flotsam and jetsam and Faye Dunaway was nice enough to explain it.2) Before Milton Bradley released Battleship as a plastic board game, you could apparently play it on graph paper.Something more interesting could have been done with Niven's character and the whole concept. With a better script this could've been a pretty good film.

John Frankenheimer's run of consecutive '60s classics comes to a rather undignified end with The Extraordinary Seaman, a universally panned flop that even the director himself couldn't defend. "The only movie I've made which I would say was a total disaster" was his somewhat honest verdict. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what goes wrong with this one – it's based on a decent story by Philip Rock, features an exceptionally talented cast and comes from a director on a winning streak. However, despite all this promise, the film emerges a hugely disappointing affair, lacking the necessary vitality and barely generating a smile during its entire running time.Shipwrecked in the Phillipines during WWII, four American seamen are desperate to find help before the Japanese invasion force arrives. Cook Oglethorpe (Mickey Rooney), gunner's mate Orville Toole (Jack Carter), silent giant Lightfoot Star (Manu Tupou) and their inexperienced senior office Lt. Morton Krim (Alan Alda) stumble across a rundown ship called the Curmudgeon, beached on a sandbank beside a river in the jungle. They board the ship and discover the only other person on board is eccentric British Navy captain John Finchhaven (David Niven), who claims that the ship belongs to him. Eventually they manage to refloat the vessel and set off toward the ocean, hoping to make for Australia. They also pick up a passenger in the attractive form of Jennifer Winslow (Faye Dunaway), a tough and resourceful trading post entrepreneur who wants out before the Japanese arrive. During their voyage, it becomes more and more obvious to the group that Captain Finchhaven is not at all what he seems. He drinks continually yet never gets drunk; he never sleeps; he never leaves the bridge; he doesn't even duck or dive for cover under enemy gunfire. Only later does the "ghostly" truth about Finchhaven become clear, as he reveals his whimsical past and the fact that he is cursed to roam the seas forever until he puts right an ancient wrong….Thankfully, The Extraordinary Seaman is at least brief with its nonsense. At a mere 80 minutes (a good 15 of which are taken up with stock newsreel footage) the film is over before it becomes an ordeal on the backside. It is, however, an ordeal on the intellect, with its intentionally absurd yet horribly flat narrative. Characters come and go without amounting to anything (Dunaway especially) and the story never seems to go anywhere. Alda tries hard in one of his earliest movie roles and Niven manages to convey his random eccentricities quite nicely, but there the positives end. The film's satirical edge is totally blunt, while the crude inter-cutting of newsreel footage, presumably to add 'comic irony', really doesn't work at all. There's a dispirited air hanging over the whole movie, as if everyone realised early on that they were involved in a disaster and decided to get it over with as quickly and indifferently as possible.

Faye Dunaway may be many things, but 'fun' rarely comes to mind. She was seductively clever in Richard Lester's "Musketeers" pictures, she had a squirrelly fashion-queen presence in "The Thomas Crown Affair", and in these later years she has projected a looser, warmer presence (such as in "Barfly" or "Don Juan DeMarco"). But here she's an icy blonde shiver: too cool, too calculating, and too aloof. This film, barely released at all by MGM, involves a group of military personnel circa WWII who are stranded on an island in the Pacific, coming upon a mystical sea captain and his creaky barge. Separated--for no apparent reason--into SIX acts, and interspersed with actual newsreel footage from the period, one has to assume the final cut was taken out of director John Frankenheimer's hands and muddied up by outsiders. Most of the actors look positively baffled, except of course for Faye. She looks shockingly unruffled by the inane plot or the silly dialogue, so placid is her demeanor. "Fun away with Dunaway"?? Anything for publicity... NO STARS from ****

That's just about all you can say about this film that is so bad you simply have to gape in wonderment. Although just 80 minutes long, the film features an extraordinary amount of padding via moronic file footage of such events as Bess Truman trying unsuccessfully to break a bottle of champagne across an aircraft's nose. The plot has something to do with a ghost (David Niven)whose old scow of World War I vessel is discovered by some American sailors in the final days of World War II in the Pacific. The producers probably thought that with Alda, Rooney, Dunaway (just off her "Bonny and Clyde" fame, recall) and Frankenheimer helming the whole thing, it couldn't miss. Well, it did.