Trailer
Plot summary
A marine salvage crew aboard the Sea Witch finds the steamship Mary Deare adrift in the English Channel during a storm. John Sands boards her hoping to claim the vessel for himself and his partner Mike, and finds former First Officer Gideon Patch aboard alone, still in command. Patch has held the ship for four days since the death of her skipper, Captain Taggart, and describes two fires, a dynamiting and a blow to the head before the crew abandoned her. He refuses to let her be taken for salvage. The storm keeps Sands from returning to his tug, and Patch pulls him back aboard; Sands then helps him stoke the boilers of the flooded engine room to raise steam.
Cast
- Ashley Cowan
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer optioned the novel intending Alfred Hitchcock to direct Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster in it, but after weeks developing the script with Ernest Lehman, Hitchcock judged it would become a boring courtroom drama, dropped it and made North by Northwest instead.
- Shooting the film was held up for long stretches because of Gary Cooper's poor health, though he was not diagnosed with cancer until the spring of 1960.
