Assault on a Queen
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Jack Donohue
Frank Sinatra
Virna Lisi
Tony Franciosa
Richard Conte
Alf Kjellin
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
After an unsuccessful attempt to recover a lost treasure off the coast of Florida, five adventurers concoct a wild scheme for highjacking the Queen Mary . The group consists of beautiful Rosa Lucchesi, an Italian who is financing the venture; Mark Brittain and Linc Langley, partners in a debt-ridden charter boat business; Vic Rossiter, an opportunist with designs on Rosa; and Eric Lauffnauer, a former U-boat commander. Utilizing a World War II German submarine they found during the Florida escapade, they bring in a sixth member, Tony Moreno, an expert in repairing submarine engines and equipment. Once their vessel is ready, they intercept the Queen Mary and, by posing as British officers, Mark, Rossiter and Lauffnauer obtain permission to go aboard. Then they warn the ship's captain that unless he turns over the contents of the safe, the Queen Mary will be torpedoed. As the men empty the safe, the Queen Mary signals an SOS to a U. S. Coast Guard cutter in the area. During the getaway, Rossiter is killed; and Mark and Lauffnauer allow the loot to fall over the side while they frantically make their escape. Back on the sub, Eric decides to torpedo the approaching Coast Guard cutter and kills Moreno for opposing him. Mark hurls himself at Eric as he fires, but the torpedoes miss their target. Rosa, Mark, and Linc escape in a rubber raft as the cutter rams the sub. Lauffnauer goes down with the sub, and the three survivors drift in the direction of South America.
Director
Jack Donohue
Cast
Frank Sinatra
Virna Lisi
Tony Franciosa
Richard Conte
Alf Kjellin
Errol John
Murray Matheson
Reginald Denny
John Warburton
Lester Matthews
Val Avery
Gilchrist Stuart
Ronald Long
Leslie Bradley
Arthur Gould-porter
Laurence Conroy
Crew
Personnel Of The United States Coast Guard Cutter <i>androscoggin</i>
Personnel Of The United States Coast Guard Cutter <i>minnetonka</i>
Officers And Crew Of The <i>queen Mary</i>
Geoffrey Alan
John P. Austin
Joseph C. Behm
Lawrence W. Butler
Thom Conroy
Cunard Steam-ship Co.
William H. Daniels
William H. Daniels
Farciot Edouart
Duke Ellington
William Goetz
Charles Grenzbach
Paul Groesse
Edith Head
Stanley Jones
Richard Lang
Paul K. Lerpae
Nellie Manley
Archie Marshek
Charles Mason
Hal Pereira
Rod Serling
Aldo Silvani
Frank Sinatra
United States Coast Guard Audio-visual Unit (hollywood)
United States Coast Guard Headquarters (washington; D. C.)
Nathan Van Cleave
Lee Vasque
Robert D. Webb
Wally Westmore
Jack Wheeler
Dorothy White
Capt. Charles C. Wilbur
Gerald D. Wineman
Dorothy Yutzi
Videos
Movie Clip
Film Details
Technical Specs
Articles
Assault on a Queen
The rather implausible plot is courtesy of a pulp novel by Jack Finney, author of the science fiction classics Time and Again and The Body Snatchers (which was turned into the great Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and adapted for the screen by Rod Serling, but as the film opens it feels more like an updated To Have and Have Not than an Ocean's knock-off. Sinatra is Hemingway-esque World War II vet Mark Brittain, a former submarine commander who now runs a failing charter boat service and deep-sea diving business in the Bahamas with his partner Linc (Errol John), a reformed alcoholic who is completely devoted to Mark. They're hired by a team of fortune hunters--smug ne'er do well Vic (Anthony Franciosa), his wealthy Italian girlfriend Rosa (Virna Lisi), and former German U-boat officer Eric Lauffnauer (Swedish star and filmmaker Alf Kjellan)--with a treasure map that supposedly marks the spot of a sunken Spanish galleon. What they find is a German submarine that was scuttled during the war, a discovery that inspires the fortune hunters to raise the sub so they can play pirate. Their new get-rich-quick scheme is a heist of a luxury liner on the high seas with the help of dummy torpedoes.
Don't sweat the details. The filmmakers certainly didn't. The plot, which involves secretly raising the wreck and completely rehabilitating it after 20 years under the sea, holds water as well as a submarine with a screen door. It's all about the chutzpah of the plan--and really, the whole concept is irresistible--and the tension between the partners in crime. Franciosa specialized in a glib, gladhanding schemers, which makes him a perfect Vic, a would-be adventurer and opportunist with a cold smile, a greedy nature, and an ego that gets put out when Rosa drops him for Mark. It's a big, flamboyant performance, which contrasts well with Sinatra's underplayed war vet Mark. Level-headed and practical, Mark doesn't take charge, he simply offers his two cents and his elbow grease, but Sinatra's easy, unforced authority grounds the plan, and the film, for that matter.
Continental actress Lisi isn't called upon to do much more than play the cool, glamorous beauty but she makes you feel the heat between Rosa and Mark as they exchange glances. Kjellan brings dignity to the role of Eric, whose respect for Mark gives them a shared camaraderie despite once having fought on opposite sides. Richard Conte joins the team as a mechanic recruited to get the engines in working order.
Director Jack Donohue, who started out making Red Skelton comedies before moving to television, is no action filmmaker, but he had history with Sinatra. He directed dozens of episodes of Sinatra's variety show in the 1950s and in 1965 he directed Sinatra in the feature film Marriage on the Rocks, a romantic farce co-starring Deborah Kerr and Dean Martin. His direction is decidedly studio-bound, shooting largely against rear projection and on sets. Shots of the submarine in motion were clearly models in a studio tank but the shipboard sequence was shot on location aboard the actual Queen Mary, which was moored near Los Angeles at the time of shooting.
In a curious bit of production casting against type, the great Duke Ellington scored the film with a swinging score. It gives the film a bounce and suits the personality of Sinatra's Mark, but it doesn't help drive the action or create suspense. It helps turn Assault on a Queen into a variation of a Rat Pack lark with a different cast of not-so-reliable partners in crime executing their dream heist against all odds.
By Sean Axmaker
Sources:
Sinatra: Hollywood His Was, Timothy Knight. Running Press, 2010.
Sinatra In Hollywood, Tom Santopietro. St. Martin's Press, 2008.
AFI Catalog of Feature Films
IMDb
Assault on a Queen
Assault on a Queen - ASSAULT ON A QUEEN - Frank Sinatra's 1966 Crime Caper Drama
This was postwar America, where every man seems to have an ambivalent military legacy trailing behind him and working knowledge of submarines. Sinatra and Trinidadian star Errol John are weary sub vets eking out a living and in the Bahamas running a fishing boat, which is all well and good until debts force them to take grinning slickster Tony Franciosa, his unbelievably hot girlfriend Virna Lisi and their German u-boat vet partner Alf Kjellin out to look for galleon treasure. During the trip, deep-sea diving along the ocean floor, Sinatra discovers a sunken German submarine, still intact. Franciosa and Co. decide to do what you or I would naturally do with this news - raise the sub, secretly moor it, spend weeks cleaning it and getting it running, and then concoct an elaborate scheme using the u-boat to rob the Queen Mary in mid-Atlantic.
What? Finney didn't pause for breath, apparently, and neither does Rod Serling's script, just leaping past the hundred plot holes and unlikelihoods inherent in the story. On the other hand, director Jack Donohue, whose career is comprised largely of sitcoms, shot the film as if on vacation, often settling for static two-shots on obvious studio sets. Nothing moves very quickly in this film, whether the scenes are underwater or not - the cleaning of the sub is lengthy and, almost comically, treated by the cast as a run-of-the-mill job, a business start-up. (The vital planning discussions are all lubricated with ubiquitous booze and cigarettes.) Sinatra is preoccupied with a yen for Lisi, and it's hard to blame him - a star in Italy and then internationally in the '60s despite having made a single remarkable film (she supported Jeanne Moreau in Joseph Losey's Eva, in 1962, but that's about it), Lisi was not a power personality but a sleek, cat-like beauty of the kind filmmakers and audiences have never been able to resist. Still, she doesn't stand a chance against Sinatra, whose redoubtable charisma here fits like an old bomber jacket. He makes it look easy, and for him it was - watch him listen to the other actors, and you'll see a born movie star, occupying center stage as if he was born to it. This is both the glory and the weakness of the star system as Hollywood devised it - regardless of material and direction, and often within films we wouldn't see twice if we were paid, someone like Sinatra remains deathlessly watchable, magnetic, a cool, convincing spectacle onto himself.
Assault on a Queen eventually does get around to its heist, and in the tradition of heist films as they were before the new George Clooney Ocean series, you know the plot is doomed. In this case the robbers never anticipated the nearby presence of a Coast Guard ship - why not? - and the agonizingly slow mechanics of deboarding a luxury liner and escaping in a raft make for nail-biting where you thought there'd be none. Sinatra is the glue here, but Franciosa, a generally obnoxious and glib actor, is splendidly obnoxious and glib here as the hopeless jerk you know won't make it out of the story alive, rounding out an Italian-American trifecta variety pack with Richard Conte, showing up midway through as a recalcitrant sub mechanic and looking perilously swollen with drink. (He looked much leaner and sharper six years later, as Don Barzini in The Godfather.) All things told, Assault on a Queen is nothing more or less than an unpretentious yesteryear matinee programmer, an echo of a time when moviegoing was a relaxed lifestyle, not submission to an assault.
For more information about Assault on a Queen, visit Olive Films. To order Assault on a Queen, go to TCM Shopping.
by Michael Atkinson
Assault on a Queen - ASSAULT ON A QUEEN - Frank Sinatra's 1966 Crime Caper Drama
Quotes
Do you always look this good in the morning?- Mark Brittain
You will have time to compare; there will be thousands of mornings.- Rosa Lucchesi
If you're so difficult now, Mr. Brittain, how can we ever become friends?- Rosa Lucchesi
Trivia
Notes
Location scenes filmed aboard the Queen Mary. Copyright claimants: Paramount Pictures and Park Lane Enterprises.
Miscellaneous Notes
Released in United States on Video June 24, 1992
Released in United States Summer June 15, 1966
Released in United States Summer June 15, 1966
Released in United States on Video June 24, 1992