So I can only make guesses as to how in hell they thought this project was a good fit for Alfred Hitchcock and his gifted screenwriter of choice, Ernest Lehman........
A man falsely accused? A hidden dead body? Mysterious deaths at sea? A conspiracy to expose? A nasty villain thwarted? Who knows......maybe?
An odd duck, the story was a lumpy combo of two-fisted sea-going adventure and talky courtroom melodrama. Lehman couldn't organize the material into anything either he or Hitchcock cared for or wanted to film........
So without mentioning it to the MGM brass, they tossed away the Hammond Innes novel and instead created "North By Northwest" from scratch...
The rest, as they say, is history........except for the rarely thought-of, rarely seen "The Wreck Of The Mary Deare", which the studio went ahead and made anyway with director Michael Anderson, releasing it the same year as the Hitchcock film.......(guess which movie everyone remembers the most?)
And "Mary Deare"? A sturdy little drama with a whole lot to recommend it........top-notch (for the era) special effects of storm-tossed ships and a memorable clash of carved-in-granite movie icons......Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston.
Cooper's an angry, disgraced Merchant Marine captain accused in the suspicious, disastrous sinking of a freighter and Heston's a salvage captain who gets sucked into the mystery. Skulking on the sidelines, practically wearing an "I'm The Villain!" placard around his neck: no less than a young Richard Harris......
But the film's swift and muscular, the two stars superb in their stoic macho poses and it's damned entertaining to watch. The big climactic wrap-up's a bit rushed and abrupt, as if affected by time, budget and Cooper's rapidly failing health.......but BQ still says it's worth a watch at least once........and you gotta love those churning studio tub seas and nifty miniature boats. 3 stars (***)
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