As a ten-year old during the '60s who used to sneak down to the engine room [and then ask permission] to gawk at the four-cylinder triple-expansion engine in a coastal steamboat, this movie had me enthralled.
Every single square inch of The Last Voyage engine room looked absolutely authentic, until I realized years later that ...it was.
Great job.
Good post.
shareAs a kid, I too was blown away by the engine room; I also was greatly impressed by the engine spaces in a James Mason film, The Decks Ran Red (1958); I simply couldn't keep my eyes off of the mammoth turbines, propeller shaft, and associated machinery!
Years later I would laugh at my exuberance for that particular film. I was also crazy for Sub & U Boat films as a kid...ah, nostalgia. Thanks!
Both movies (The Last Voyage and The Decks Ran Red) were produced and directed by Andrew L. Stone, renowned for shooting virtually every foot of all his films in actual locations -- in these cases, the real engine rooms of real ships.
No one's mentioned it for the record, but of course the engine room of the S.S. Clarendon was in fact that of the venerable transatlantic French liner, the Ile de France. It had been purchased by wreckers in Japan and was on its way to be broken up when Stone rented it for partial demolition and sinking in the Sea of Japan for The Last Voyage. So we got a partial photographic record of a great ship before it was destroyed, far from its accustomed home waters...after more than three decades of service, including as the principle rescue vessel during the Andrea Doria disaster in 1956.