Krakatoa, East of Java is a 1968 American disaster film starring Maximilian Schell and Brian Keith. During the 1970s, the film was re-released under the title Volcano. The story is loosely based on events surrounding the 1883 eruption of the volcano on the island of Krakatoa, with the characters engaged in the recovery of a cargo of pearls from a shipwreck perilously close to the volcano. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Special Visual Effects.
Krakatoa is actually west of Java, but the movie's producers thought that "East" sounded more atmospheric.
Plot
In 1883, the volcano on the island of Krakatoa in the Netherlands East Indies begins to erupt, terrorizing the children at a mission school in Palembang on nearby Sumatra.
Meanwhile, across the Sunda Strait at her homeport of Anjer on the west coast of Java, the steamer Batavia Queen, under the command of Captain Chris Hanson, takes aboard passengers and cargo, including a diving bell and a balloon. Among the passengers coming aboard are Douglas Rigby, the designer, owner, and operator of the diving bell; Giovanni Borghese and his son Leoncavallo, who own and operate the balloon as "The Flying Borgheses"; Harry Connerly, a diver; Connerly's mistress Charley Adams, who is a professional singer — a soprano, as she likes to point out to people — and former saloon hostess; four female Japanese pearl divers led by Toshi; and Laura Travis, a married woman who had an extramarital affair with Hanson in Batavia.
Laura was married to an abusive man with whom she had a son named Peter. Her husband did not want the marriage and threatened to take Peter away from her if she asked for a divorce. Wanting to be with Hanson, she had asked for a divorce anyway, and her husband had left her, taking both Peter and a fortune in pearls with him aboard the steamer Arianna. The Arianna had sunk off Krakatoa during a storm, and a guilt-ridden Laura, fearing that Peter had died aboard the Arianna and blaming herself for his death, had spent a year in a mental institution before coming aboard the Batavia Queen.
Hanson has organized the Batavia Queens voyage to find the wreck of the Arianna, salvage the pearls, and determine Peter's fate — and to find Peter if he is still alive. Hanson plans to use a variety of techniques to search for the wreck and salvage the pearls, with the Borgheses' balloon conducting an aerial search of shallow waters around Krakatoa, the pearl divers providing a mobile underwater search-and-salvage capability in shallow waters, Rigby in his diving bell searching in deeper water, and Connerly responsible both for recovering the pearls if they are in waters too deep for the pearl divers and for assisting in the heavy work of bringing the Ariannas safe to the surface. Colonial authorities arrive just before the Batavia Queen departs and force Hanson to take 30 convicts and their jailer aboard for transportation to Madura Island, countering his argument that the ship is not equipped to accommodate them and has no room for them by telling him to transport the prisoners in the ship's hold in appalling conditions. Hanson plans to deliver the convicts to Madura after recovering the pearls off Krakatoa. One of the prisoners, Lester Danzig, is an acquaintance of Hanson's, and Hanson allows him to make the voyage on deck instead of in the hold. Aware that Krakatoa has begun to erupt and warned by a colonial official that the island is a "raging volcano", Hanson replies that the volcano had been quiet for the previous 200 years and posed no threat now.