Krakatoa, East of Java (1968) on Netflix
G19682h 11mAdventureDramaRomance
Captain Chris Hanson takes the steamer Batavia Queen to Krakatoa in 1883 to salvage pearls from the Arianna, wrecked there. Laura Travis, a passenger, believes her son went down with the ship.
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- Netflix1.4/5
- IMDb5.5/102,181 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes0%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1883, the volcano on Krakatoa begins erupting and frightens the children at a mission school across the water in Palembang, on Sumatra. At Anjer, on Java, the steamer Batavia Queen loads passengers for a voyage under Captain Chris Hanson: Douglas Rigby and his diving bell, the balloonists Giovanni and Leoncavallo Borghese, the diver Harry Connerly and Charley Adams, pearl divers from Japan under Toshi, and Laura Travis, who had an affair with Hanson in Batavia. Laura's abusive husband had taken their son Peter and a fortune in pearls away on the steamer Arianna, which sank near Krakatoa, and she spent a year in an institution afterward. Hanson means to find the wreck, recover the pearls and learn whether the boy lived. Colonial authorities make him carry thirty convicts and their jailer to Madura.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Krakatoa, East of Java (1968)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The producers of Krakatoa, East of Java shot the special effects scenes before the script was written, then wrote the script around those sequences.
- Eugène Lourié scouted Spain for a steamer to play the Batavia Queen and chose a former passenger-cargo tramp steamer he found unloading coal in Bilbao, whose captain said she had been built in England around 1880.
- Lourié's team built two models of the Batavia Queen: an 18-foot one-tenth-scale model, and a one-twentieth-scale model for long shots that proved too small to look realistic, so Lourié used only the larger model.
- For the final tsunami scene, the team spent three days filming the model in a water tank under extreme conditions, using 35-foot dump tanks holding 2,600 gallons, fire hoses and a wind machine to make large waves.
- Producer Philip Yordan dropped out after the special effects were shot, and a new associate producer commissioned a new script, leading to inconsistent tone and racy additions like Charley's striptease.
- The film's makers learned during production that Krakatoa is west of Java, but kept the wrong title because they thought 'East' sounded more exotic; the film helped popularize the spelling 'Krakatoa' over the Indonesian 'Krakatau'.
- Director Bernard L. Kowalski said the shoot had more than its share of problems, since weather, sea, children and animals could not be controlled, but nearly everyone bore up under very trying circumstances. His life was threatened four times.
