1965 Directed by Stanley Kramer
Passengers on a ship traveling from Mexico to Europe in the 1930s represent society at large in that era. The crew is German, including the ship's Dr. Schumann, who falls in love with one of the passengers, La Condesa. A young American woman, Jenny, is traveling with the man she loves, David. Jenny is fascinated and puzzled by just who some of the other passengers are.
Vivien Leigh Simone Signoret José Ferrer Lee Marvin Oskar Werner Elizabeth Ashley George Segal José Greco Michael Dunn Charles Korvin Heinz Rühmann Lilia Skala BarBara Luna Christiane Schmidtmer Alf Kjellin Werner Klemperer John Wengraf Olga Fabian Gila Golan Oscar Beregi Jr. Stanley Adams Kaaren Verne Charles De Vries Lydia Torea Henry Calvin Paul Daniel David Renard Rudy Carrela Silvia Marino Show All…
El barco de los locos, La nef des fous, Narreskibet, Narrilaiva, Narrenes skip, Narrskeppet, Das Narrenschiff, A Nave dos Loucos
Hogan Hereos' Colonel Klink and Gone With The Wind's Scarlett O'Hara in a movie romance? I would never have put those two together but that is what you get in this Oscar winning movie. It actually got 7 nominations including a Best Picture nomination...it won 2 times.
This one takes place in 1933....and seems like an expensive episode of the Love Boat. A German ocean liner travels from Mexico to Germany in 26 days. The changing political landscape of Germany is one of the main topics of conversations. Hindsight lets us identify the people that will willingly go along with Hitler, those that are in denial about Hitler and those only concerned about themselves. Other story lines include a George…
The best part of the movie is when Vivien Leigh beats the crap outta Lee Marvin with her high heel.
"I'm a German first and a Jew second. There are 10 million Jews in Germany. What are they going to do, kill us all?" ... And you watch the horror grow on the face of the listener, who happens to be a German dwarf, likely destined for a similar fate.
In the early 1960's there was still much troubling analysis going around about what happened to Germany 20 years earlier, as well there should have been, but it makes for a very self-serious movie here, a "Grand Hotel"-like picture about a bunch of disparate characters onboard a ship in 1933. Jose Ferrer, as an anti-Semite businessman, is the personification of how a nation that so clearly knew better so easily…
"Everybody on this ship is in love. Love me whether or not I love you. Love me whether I am fit to love. Love me whether I am able to love. Even if there is no such thing as love. Love me."
Ship of Fools is a film adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's 1962 novel of the same name by director Stanley Kramer. It tells the tale of passengers of a German passenger ship going from Mexico to Germany in 1933. Over the course of the journey, the passengers from different backgrounds and nationalities, will interact with one another revealing their successes, dreams, disappointments and prejudices.
This was hard to get through as the pace was very slow and the…
I like the idea of Stanley Kramer more than the films of Stanley Kramer. His films are my politics, progressive, good-intentioned, decent. But they aren't my films. They are mostly stolid, preachy, overly lengthy and under paced. He has made good films, On the Beach may even be a great film, but he has not made many vital films. Ship of Fools is another well-mannered, inclusive, interesting film, that somewhat lacks greatness.
Now, intriguingly, there is greatness in it, at least in one of the subplots. Oskar Werner and his touching, intimate scenes with Simone Signoret are beautifully judged. Werner is spectacularly good in the film, richly deserving his Oscar nomination for Best Actor (he lost out to his cast-mate…
In a deleted scene, Vivien Leigh attends a screening of Cat Ballou—and that is actually her motivation for beating the hell out of Lee Marvin with her shoe
Part of my 5 Directors x 5 Unseen Films (8) challenge.
This film by director Stanley Kramer was based upon the 1962 novel by Katherine Anne Porter. It tells the tale of disparate characters sailing aboard a German passenger ship for 26 days from Mexico to Europe in 1933, when the Nazi Party was on the rise and poor Spanish emigrants were being repatriated to their homeland en mass.
Kramer's ship is populated by a star-studded cast. There's Captain Thiele (Charles Korvin), who would rather being chasing skirts than entertaining boring First Class sojourners or seeing to the needs of hundreds of Spanish refugees traveling Deck Class. He's assisted by the ship's physician, Dr. Wilhelm Schumann (Oskar Werner), who takes…
Katherine Anne Porter's SHIP OF FOOLS is one of the great post-war American novels. Unfortunately, the best we can say of Stanley Kramer's film version is that it's a reasonably entertaining floating "Grand Hotel" that touches greatness momentarily and that's only when Oskar Werner and Simone Signoret are on screen yet that seems enough. He's the ship's doctor and she's the drug-addicted La Condessa and they have a ship-board romance of sorts and they elevate the picture onto an altogether higher plain. Indeed, Werner's performance is as great as any by an actor in the movies. I suppose we should at least be grateful the Academy nominated him at all, though losing the Oscar to Lee Marvin in CAT BALLOU…
Vivien and Simone Signoret are the show stealers here. That's all you need to watch this film for, in truth.
