Sea Wife (1957)

Good movie but grossly overrated

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Still pining for a mysterious woman with whom he and two other gentlemen shared a lifeboat many months earlier, a British army officer recollects the shipwreck that led to their encounter as well as their intimate time together in this early career Richard Burton motion picture. The film plays out primarily in flashback and seeing Burton so young is just as curious as Joan Collins being cast as his love interest - a nun who never revealed her true identity to him during their time together. The story is propelled by a couple of implausible elements -- namely, her extreme reluctance to say that she is a nun, and the fact that the four shipwreck survivors insist on calling each other by nicknames rather than their real names -- however, these improbabilities add unexpected layers of depths. In particular, the film handles Burton's attraction to Collins with delightful ambiguity; we never find out if she truly ever reciprocated his feelings, and is it out of craving for human affection that she chose to never tell him that she was a nun? The naming thing is quite interesting too as we get to know the characters through their traits and idiosyncrasies more than anything else, and as Collins keeps telling Burton, things are different when stuck out at sea. Clocking in at just over an hour and a quarter long, the film feels incredibly short with a lot of unrealised narrative potential, but the ending is so unexpected and packs such an emotional wallop that it is hard not to exit the film a tad shaken. Certainly, 'Sea Wife' is very far removed from the average wartime romantic drama out there.

Pretty awful. This potboiler has the look and feel of a first rate production but is done in by a truly dreadful script which drags out just about every cliché in the lost at sea/shipwrecked on a desert isle canon. During WWII, four Brits are left adrift in a dingy after the freighter they're on is bombed. They face one peril after another from hostile Japanese to shark attack. Richard Burton is "Biscuit" and Joan Collins is "Sea Wife." She's also a nun...sexual tension ensues. Also on board are Cy Grant as "Number 4" and bigoted (and aptly named) Basil Sydney as "Bulldog." The dull direction is by Bob McNaught (replacing Roberto Rossellini[!], who worked on another version of the script...deemed too "moral" and not "adventurous" enough for 20th Century Fox). Filmed in Jamaica, which is really the only plus.

The author of the story from whence this came (JM Scott, 'Sea-Wyf and Biscuit') evidently did not write with the cinema in mind; but judging by this mile-high venture the Fox production machine was less than fastidious in its choice of material to show off Cinemascope to worry too much about such trivial dramatic considerations.Four WWII disparates - a nun, a black, a racist, and a slice of ham - are thrown together on a lifeboat and begin to drift aimlessly. The film in which they find themselves marooned quickly decides to follow suit, as they attribute themselves misnomers such as "Biscuit", "Seawife", "Bulldog" and "No. 4", and spend most of the rest of their time posturing at opposite ends of the boat for the Cinemascope frame, and expatiating whilst bearing 'meaningful' fixed stares of interminable solemnity. Yes, we're in the sort of 'external monologue' territory that most of those predisposed to such masochism sensibly choose to do so within the confines of the theatre.Attempts are made to liven things up with the introduction of some men overboard, Japs, sharks and a desert island (in no particular order); however the pervasive verbosity continues unabated, as does its failure to translate into dramatic coherence; and with it the lament that the unjust critics reception of Collins' performance in 'Land Of The Pharoas' two years earlier pretty much killed off her chances of ever getting to do anything remotely credible within the American mainstream cinema. Connoiseurs of cinematic Wartime seasickness are best advised to stick with Hitchcock's 'Lifeboat'.

Joan Collins is a nun (!!) shipwrecked on an island with Burton. This movie is hilarious and sexy. Burton as usual is so serious he's got his tongue in his cheek because the script's morality won't let him use it to plow the ever-gorgeous Collins. I haven't seen it for years, but I still use Burton's growling "I love you, Sea Wife" to make my wife laugh. And a note on Collins: Evidently the eternal self-pitier Russell Crowe was upset to see himself compared to her at an awards show. But she is the one who was shamed; she was, is, and will always be wonderful. Enjoy this flick and "Land of the Pharoahs" as proof!