User reviews

An interesting premise, somewhere between "Casablanca" and Suzie Wong, with name-brand actors. But this wound up as a weak period piece redeemed by a few (very few) clever moments and many nice background shots of Hong Kong as it was. Not many mid-20th-century films produced in the West with Hong Kong themes are available on DVD or video (at least we have "World of Suzie Wong") and fewer still had actual Hong Kong locations, so I am not disappointed in the film. Otherwise, it's a watchable "B" movie with Orson Welles as a bonus.

Ferry to Hong Kong is a mildly amusing film due to an obese Orson Welles treating the film as a farcical comedy. He plays Captain Hart, who despite the prissy exterior is a bit of a blackguard. He runs an old ferry between Hong Kong to Macau.

Hart is stuck with Mark Conrad (Curd Jürgens) a drunken, troublemaker, expelled from Hong Kong and denied entry to Macau. He is destined to remain a passenger on the ferry much to Hart's anger, he even sets up a rigged bet to get rid off this unwanted passenger. Despite looking dishevelled Conrad earns the sympathy of Liz (Sylvia Syms) who is a teacher to some children regularly on board.

Conrad and Captain Hart have to set aside their mutual loathing when the ship encounters a typhoon and later seized by pirates with Conrad having to take responsibility and control of the situation the ship's passengers find themselves in.

The film benefits from the Hong Kong location shooting which provides a colourful backdrop, the script is pedestrian and at times hammy as Welles performance.

As has been mentioned it is extremely interesting to see Hong Kong as it was in the 1950s,much different to the way it is today.However as to the film,what we're they thinking of.Lewis Gilbert is such an experienced director having made so many fine films.Orson Welled is completely out of sync with everyone else.I couldn't work out if he was doing an impersonation of Charles Laughton or Arthur Treacher.Sylvia Simms as a romantic lead for Curt Jurgens.Apparently Jurgens was constantly arguing with WellesThe pirate theme at the end at least brings a bit of action to the end of the film.You don't know whether to laugh or cry.Maybe the best description is,it's Rank.

After boy-genius Orson Welles gave us his debut masterpiece `Citizen Kane', followed it up with the wonderful `Magnificent Ambersons'(and who could forget his charismatic Harry Lime in Carol Reed's `Third Man'?) he really had nowhere to go except down.

But I never expected to see him as he is in `Ferry to Hong Kong' mugging and pulling faces to try to produce cheap laughs in an awful English accent. He even waddles around at one stage with a board strapped to his back, all dignity gone. To paraphrase a well-known script-writer from Stratford `When great Orson fell, what a fall was there!'

Otherwise this is a pretty poor attempt at a comedy with perhaps some interest for those who want to see ever-changing Hong Kong as it was in the late Fifties.

I wish I hadn't seen `Ferry to Hong Kong'

Apparently this film did very badly at the box office, yet in time it may be regarded with the same nostalgia as the all time classics. It has a top class cast and is much underrated. Well worth watching again and again.

Absolutely fantastic film with three greats at the top of their game The legend Noel Purcell, Jurgens & Wells as two opposites or are they are excellently cast.

Wells English accent & comedy timing is very good, shame he didn't do more comedy, Jurgens is just pure class as the black sheep rouge

Amazing action sets the wonderful cast crew locations are a gem of its time well worth a watch and beautiful Sylvia Syms always a treat

If you liked Father Goose, check out an obscure movie with a somewhat similar feel to it: Ferry to Hong Kong. Curd Jurgens plays a scruffy barfly with a temper, and when the authorities have finally had enough of him, they ship him out of Hong Kong to Macao on Captain Orson Welles's ferry. However, Macau won't let him in and ships him back to Hong Kong. Orson hates him, but there's nothing to be done, so back and forth ad nauseum they travel. Enter Sylvia Syms, a pretty and proper English schoolteacher in charge of some Chinese kids who take the ferry every Friday.

This movie does have a darker turn to it, with typhoons and pirates to worry about - but then again, Father Goose has Nazis and snake bites. I loved seeing Curd let his hair down in this fun, comical role. As usual, he's larger than life, and even his drunken demeaner is endearing. Sylvia gives a great Deborah Kerr impression, and you keep hoping for her sake that he'll clean up. He and Sylvia (or he and Deborah, for that matter) could have easily handled Father Goose. Although, Orson Welles with his caterpillar-esque accent and strange expressions probably couldn't have played the straight-faced Trevor Howard counterpart.

There's the most adorable scene when Curd finally cleans up and takes Sylvia "out to dinner" on the ferry since he's legally prohibited from stepping foot on land. Predating The Terminal by fifty years, he prepares a delightful evening on the boat with the help of a few friends and their imagination. They point to empty tables and gossip about other patrons, they look over the menu carefully, and they indulge in martinis, wine, champagne, and brandy. Of course, they're all alone, they only eat bowls of rice, and there's only one little liquor bottle to sustain them. But it's incredibly sweet and easily the best scene in the movie.

If you've only seen Curd playing soldiers or if you want a China Seas adventure with a bit of laughter and a lot of charm, find a copy of this movie. It'll make you an instant fan.

DLM Warning: If you suffer from vertigo or dizzy spells, like my mom does, this movie might not be your friend. During the typhoon scene, the camera tilts back and forth quite a bit, and that will make you sick. In other words, "Don't Look, Mom!"

While I thought Orson Wells was miscast as the captain when there were many better-suited actors for that role, I felt that overall, the film was well acted by the rest of the cast. An entertaining story was supported by capable 1959 movie-maker's - albeit them having to endure the malaise of that era's technological restrictions. An easy watch.

Lewis Gilbert, who directed three passable James Bond vehicles (YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, MOONRAKER, and THE SPY WHO LOVED ME) must have been wet behind the ears when he directed FERRY TO HONG KONG... and with Orson Welles as captain of the good ship Fat Annie in the cast!

Curt Jurgens, a German-born thespian of some quality and fame in the 1950s and 1960s, plays the dashing drunk and disheveled hero who wants to beat the dragon, encouraged to that end by exceedingly beautiful Sylvia Sims.

With some fisticuffs, fights, and blows over the head delivered by a fast fattening Welles, ably aided by fast aging Jurgens with pirates and criminals as targets, you see poor Fat Annie bubble down and sink in Kowloon Bay off then British colony Hong Kong, with some memorable sunset shots (could it be symbolic of the sun setting on the British Empire?)

If this crit makes no sense to you, the plot made no sense to me either, and it drags on for an interminable 111 minutes. I will NOT watch it again.

Orson Welles bulked up to play Hank Quinlan in 'Touch of Evil'. Soon afterwards he pitched up in this British effort to crack foreign markets with a multinational cast and exotic location shooting- and it became clear that he had surrendered in the battle of avoirdupois.

A shame, because he thereby condemned himself to playing 'larger than life' characters in historical romps or fantasies to finance his gargantuan appetites and bootlace productions. Trying to get closer to normality, as he had been in 'Tomorrow is Forever' or his own 'Lady from Shanghai', might have stretched him more than Genghis Khan, Louis XVIII or Long John Silver.

As Captain Cecil Hart, apparently a pompous British owner-captain of the titular old tub, Welles starts out as a relatively normal if annoying fellow, redeemed by his love of flowers and pet birds. But he soon devolves into spluttering, grimacing and waddling, like Charles Laughton slumming it with Abbott and Costello. And inevitably the skipper is unmasked as yet another flimflam artist: Welles gave dissenters from the martyred-genius myth ammo by playing so many.

He has his cigar, his card-deck prestidigitation and matchlessly modulated voice to remind us of the real Orson. His accent hovers between Brandoesque British and Father Mapple, with brief reminders of 'Black Irish, notorious waterfront agitator'. It is a ham's attempt to hijack the film, on a par with the Chinese pirates' attempt on the 'Fat Annie', and it is a disservice to his co-stars. As usual, Welles tried to rewrite his dialogue and take over direction, resisted by Lewis Gilbert. Curt Jurgens objected and the result was an unhappy shoot.

Gilbert hated the result, but it has its pleasures. He reconciles a largely confined setting and small star cast well with CinemaScope, while the shore footage of an amazingly undeveloped Hong Kong and Macau looks gorgeous in the brief heyday of Eastmancolor, which outdid monopack Technicolor. The cinematography comes up pin-sharp and lustrous; really there has been no progress in that department in sixty years. A former boy actor, Gilbert coaxes nice cameos from Sylvia Syms's schoolgirl flock.

Jurgens, replacing Peter Finch, has to wear one soiled suit all through. He seemed a strange choice but his hard edges as an Anglo-Austrian drifter, brawler and drunk are not planed down for a family film; his charm and courage emerge persuasively, and his blue eyes shine more brightly as he shapes up.

Syms was at the height of her beauty as an English rose with a steel core, following 'Ice Cold in Alex'. Noel Purcell contrives to take the nasty taste out of being an Irish engineer with a Chinese wife and big family in each port, though neither spouse speaks.

This is a very colonial flick, in which the only natives are hoodlums. And its structural problem is the tacked-on second climax of the pirate raid. Jurgens superseding the drunk Captain during a typhoon was enough to exonerate him. But we then have to sit through twenty minutes of menace from a bald thug, including a very discordant moment of violence involving the ever-wimpish Jeremy Spenser as the Captain's cowardly underling.

Welles is sidelined by then. For some reason he spends the last two reels dead drunk or with a board strapped to his back, as if the production were punishing him for insubordination.

Whatever his regrets, Gilbert went back to the Far East for my favourite Bond film, 'You Only Live Twice', and used Jurgens as the villain in 'The Spy Who Loved Me'.