A Glittering Cast: Ship of Fools

1965 Drama 

From Columbia Pictures

Directed by Stanley Kramer

Starring 

Vivien Leigh

Simone Signoret

José Ferrer

Lee Marvin

Oskar Werner

Elizabeth Ashley

George Segal

Michael Dunn

José Greco

Charles Korvin

Heinz Rühmann

Christiane Schmidtmer

Alf Kjellin

Barbara Luna

Gila Golan

Lilia Skala

Werner Klemperer

Diminutive Michael Dunn opens the film by climbing on and overlooking the railing of a ship, looking directly into the camera.  My name is Karl Glocken, he says, and this is a ship of fools.  I am a fool.  You'll meet more fools as we go along.  This tub is packed with them... emancipated ladies, ballplayers, lovers, dog lovers, ladies of joy, tolerant Jews, dwarfs, all kinds.  And who knows, if you look closely enough, you may even find yourself onboard.

Some said at the time that if you sat down for this long (2 hours, 29 minutes) soap opera, then you were the fool.  I was, however, completely absorbed, finding the soap opera aspects to be rather elegant.  Additionally it certainly qualifies for our glittering cast banner.  The four lead actors are all Oscar winners and the entire cast is a large contingent of talented international performers.  The film would be nominated for eight Oscars.

It is based on Katherine Anne Porter's popular 500-page 1962 novel about a passenger ship in 1933 that is sailing from Veracruz, Mexico to Bremerhaven, Germany.  Among those on board are many Germans, Jews, a few Americans and, after a brief stop in Cuba, 600 displaced Spanish farm workers who are being deported back to Spain by order of the Cuban dictator.  Of course they are housed in steerage and away from other passengers. 

We need to tell you something about the passengers.  Let's check over the ship's registry...

Werner, as Dr. Schumann, the ship's doctor, has the most screen time of the large cast, and Signoret would be next as La Condesa.  She also boards the ship in Cuba but is being transported to a prison in the Canary Islands.  She has a free run of the ship and uses it to take up with the doctor.  At first she pursues him because she has an opiate addiction, hoping that he will help her with prescriptions, which he does, but she comes to care for him and vice versa.  Both know there is no future for them.  He hides from her his heart condition.

Signoret & Werner

This is a voyage of unhappiness and of course pending unhappiness.  The countess and the doctor both have a sense of doom.  He is also fighting for the people in steerage to be treated like human beings and is at odds with his captain over it.

We first meet Mary Treadwell (Leigh) and Tenny (Marvin) when he plops down at her two-top table where she's dining alone.  She lets him know she is unhappy about the intrusion.  Tenny is an alcoholic former baseball player who never got the breaks he was looking for and has never moved forward in his life.  He's still looking for the glory... perhaps that's the reason for his obnoxious behavior.  Or maybe it's his falling down, word-slurring drunken behavior.

An uncomfortable Marvin & Leigh

He and Mary are both Americans.  The only other thing they have in common is that she, too, is an alcoholic, albeit a refined one.  She's an embittered man-hater who nonetheless is heading for Paris where she hopes to recapture her lost youth.  She's 46 and not dealing with it.

One of the best scenes involves these two characters.  We are aware that Mary does not like Tenny.  It's grown worse through brief sightings but then one night he drunkenly and mistakenly enters her cabin and even though he realizes his error, he thinks he will hang on her and slobber.  Oh no, no, no, no.  She takes off her shoe and mercilessly beats him, even after he falls down.  He manages to get into the corridor although she continues to pound him. 

A rare, happy moment for Segal and Ashley

Americans Jenny (Ashley) and David (Segal) are not married and she has paid for his fare because he's a struggling artist or well, he's just struggling.  He and Jenny discuss marriage but no one's leaping.  She questions why they get along so well horizontally and fail so miserably vertically.  Are they just ill-suited to one another?  She's trying to get something from the heart out of him as they sit at their little round table watching others stroll by.  He hasn't paid attention to anything she's saying since he's studying faces to put on his next canvas. His lack of attention annoys the hell out of her.  He thinks she's too needy.  She thinks he's immature.

Glocken (Dunn), as you may have guessed from the opening, is rather like our host.  He sees all, hears all, he noses around.  He's a funny, decent guy and there are a couple of them on board.  He has been shunned from the daily invites to dine with the captain at his table because he is a dwarf.  

The delightful Michael Dunn

Captain Thiele (Korvin) is a handsome and elegant-looking man who appears to have a special interest in the doctor.  Perhaps because the captain has formed a dislike of La Contesa which raises the doctor's ire.   He secretly holds a grudge against all people he feels are beneath him in any way.  His manipulation of those who do and don't sit at his table is most egregious.  And consider that he allows a German couple's bulldog to sit at the table. 

Utterly offensive are the anti-Semitic rants of a German businessman, Rieber (Ferrer), who is also a Nazi.  He is loud, controlling, annihilating and controls the atmosphere at the captain's table.  Though married he is in the company of a young Amazonian blonde (Schmidtmer).  

Lowenthal (Rühmann) is also not invited to sit at the captain's table because he is Jewish.  He sits at a side table with the also ostracized Glocken and they intellectually discuss what's happening with the world.  Lowenthal, another nice guy, and well-meaning but not forward thinking, says at one point... I am German first and a Jew second.  There are nearly a million Jews in Germany... what are they going to do, kill us all?

Another one denied entry to the captain's table is the German Freytag (Kjellin) which happens when Rieber hears he is married to a Jewish woman who is not onboard.  The calm, rather stoic Freytag is wildly incensed and creates a public disturbance.

Greco is Pepe, the leader of a troupe of flamenco dancers (duh), who puts on nightly shows for the other passengers.  He is a temperamental sort who pimps out his women during the voyage.  Barbara Luna plays Amparo who seems to have been Pepe's special girl although their relationship is unraveling.  

I loved the film's ending.  Some called it (dismissively) a floating Grand Hotel.  Where a hotel film may end with seeing customer by customer, actor by actor, check out, here we have them coming down the gangplank... slowly, enough time to observe how they've weathered the crossing, decked out in their finery.  

With this talent it shouldn't be surprising that all give strong performances.  Director Kramer knew about large, impressive casts and how to manage them.  There were comments, oddly derogatory for some reason, that Ship wasn't enough of a message film like so many of his others.  I guess it's not alright to just make a film intended as an entertainment piece.  Okay, it's not The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg or Guess Who's Coming to Dinner with their strong messages, but it's a very fine ensemble piece with a penetrating look into what it might have been like for a group of privileged people at the dawning of the Nazi era. 

While again I credit the cast with top-notch performances, I don't think some traits of the characters were too far removed from the actors playing them.  Mary/Leigh were alcoholics whose lives had scrambled and who had men and sexual issues.  Tenny/Marvin were alcoholics, womanizers and embittered loners who didn't navigate well in polite society.  

Perhaps the film's only light moment... indeed a quite unexpected, funny one... has Leigh walking down the corridor to her cabin and she suddenly goes into a Charleston when she hears the right music (or is it just us, the audience, who hears it?).  

Signoret, for whatever reasons (I need to find a bio on her), always seemed such a sad person and La Contesa certainly is.  Both are earthy women who enjoyed men and sex.   Both women were in search of kindness and tenderness.  Many of Signoret's characters had these same traits.  I also picked up much sadness and remoteness in Werner and certainly in Dr. Schumann.  The contesa's ability to break through that remoteness is one of the film's tenderest moments. 

Director Kramer & his leading ladies

Rieber/Ferrer are bombastic, loud, opinionated, intellectual and controlling and way too full of themselves.  Weren't the young Segal & David cut from the same cloth?  I imagine Kramer saying to him (and others) just be yourself so David was immature, self-obsessed and whining about how life has dealt him a dirty blow, including others' failure to see his remarkable talent. 

Though she has top-billing, I have always wondered why Leigh took this role.  Maybe she needed the dough.  Maybe she needed to get out of the house, maybe she needed to shake off her mental illness.  And adding to it that her screen time is less than some others and her character and accompanying story isn't the central one.  It would end up being the last film she would make.

Leigh hadn't made a a film in four years, since The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, in a role not unlike the character she was signing on for in Ship.  There was always concern that she would slip into one of her manic episodes, many of which were truly unforgettable, alarming and immensely sad.  But she had felt good around the time Kramer offered her the role and so she accepted.  He found her a wonderful home to rent in the Hollywood Hills, cementing her happiness.

But a few weeks into the shoot, she had one of her episodes, triggered by her drinking and insecurities, real and imagined.  She turned against many of her coworkers, actors and crew, but apparently was the worst with the formidable Signoret, whom she literally didn't have to act with because they didn't share any scenes together.  Despite the fact that Signoret could have mopped the floor with Leigh, the actress was kind and sympathetic and became one of Leigh's staunchest allies.

Katharine Hepburn, a good friend of the British actress and who was originally penciled in for the contesa role, was often on the Columbia lot to look after her good friend.  Leigh seldom had any memory of whom she hurt and upon finding out would bend over backwards with apologies and gifts.

Leigh's other good buddy on the set was, oddly enough, Marvin.  He knew a comrade when he saw one.  He had originally turned down the role but reconsidered largely because Leigh was in the film.  He idolized her and her massive talent.  He knew they both had alcohol issues and massive insecurities so he was there for her in any way he could be.  

And all of their good-naturedness with one another came after a rough beginning.  She could not stand his exhaling gusts of stale Scotch breath and ordered him off the set and refused to do a scene with him until he cleaned it up.  But once he did and once he witnessed her problems, he was a valued friend and confidante to her.  After they played their last scene together, she told him God, you have talent.  He probably took that one to his grave.  One thing he definitely did was keep the shoe with which she beat him.  It was a memento he didn't want to do without.

The shoe

Kramer liked Marvin having directed him in 1955's Not as a Stranger and producing a few more of the actor's films.  Kramer said about Marvin... I'm not his psychiatrist.  I don't know whether he has one or needs one.  I'm only saying to understand him, one needs help.  Kramer gives Marvin a great scene to help understand his sad character when he breaks down to his cabin-mate Dunn about his failed baseball career.  How different it was to see such raw human emotion out of this laconic actor.

It shouldn't be a surprise to hear that the entire film was made on four Hollywood soundstages of Columbia Pictures.  I thought, however, that piecing in the ocean shots was done seamlessly.

Some critics of the movie have savaged it (some ridiculously so... made me mad to read some) but I have always liked it.  Of course, as you may know, I love these glittering casts and they're most enjoyable when they're all thrown together like this and I can watch them play off one another.  But I see this as a film that appeals to the intellect and emotions and is a satisfactory entertainment experience.  

Ship of Fools would go on to cop eight Oscar nominations including best picture, best acting for Signoret, Werner and Dunn, screenplay (by Abby Man who adapted Porter's novel) and costumes (some said the costumes were more 1960s than 1933).  It would win for best cinematography and best art direction and set decoration.

One thing the naysayers always carped about was wanting to have more background on the characters, stating rightly that a story is stronger when we become invested in characters when the good writing has allowed us to notice.  In general, hell, I couldn't agree more.  But really now, in this case, how could that have been accomplished on all these people without making the movie five hours long?  I always thought learning just a few things about shipboard passengers is exactly how it really would be... passing in the night and all that rot, eh wot?

Here, Stanley Kramer wants to tell you about his movie...

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