Ship of Fools

It becomes obvious early on that Stanley Kramer is back up on a soapbox preaching the “gospel” in his 1965 film Ship of Fools. The message he is preaching may be a worthwhile one, but how it is being handled isn’t quite there this time around. What we are being treated to over the two and a half hours of screentime is some heavy-handed moralizing and a whole lot of screen filler, brought to us through a fairly large ensemble cast of actors who are all giving it their best despite the heavy-handed script.

The basic plot is that a passenger ship in 1933 has set sail from Veracruz, Mexico, en route to Bremerhaven, Germany. On board are a mixture of German citizens, some of higher stature and some who will be going back to a country that is rapidly turning on their “kind”. Along the route, this ship picks up an additional 600 displaced workers from Cuba to deport back to Spain, far more than the ship is certified to carry. It also picks up a Spanish countess, La Condesa (Simone Signoret), who is being deported to a Spanish prison for her drug abuse. 

Along the way, we begin to see a clear divide amongst the German citizens, most of whom are invited daily to sit at the captain’s table for meals while a select few are excluded: Lowenthal (Heinz Rühmann), a German Jew who sees no real concern with the rise of antisemitism in Germany as there are simply too many Jews in Germany for the Aryan Nazis to simply eliminate; and Glocken (Michael Dunn), a dwarf whose physical abnormality is used as an excuse to exclude him from the table. Later, Freytag (Alf Kjellin) is also banished from the captain’s table when word gets out that he is married to a Jewish woman whom he is not traveling with. 

The ship’s doctor, Schumann (Oskar Werner), has sympathy for La Condesa and helps her as she struggles with withdrawals and her own depression while she, in turn, helps him as he struggles with a heart condition he doesn’t know she knows about. Reiber (Jose Ferrer) rants on night after night about Nazi ideology and his own antisemitism and begins an affair with Lizzi (Christiane Schmidtmer), who admires his vitality until she discovers he is married. 

Tenny (Lee Marvin), whose inclusion on this voyage is inexplicable, is a washed-out baseball player turned coach. He is crass and vulgar and carries a hefty chip on his shoulder over his perceived failures as a player. He is often sat across from Mary Treadwell (Vivien Leigh), an aged divorcee, who is hoping to recapture her youth in Paris. She finds Tenny deplorable and, when he expresses his surprise at the open hostility towards Jews, she replies that perhaps he was too busy “lynching Negroes” to focus on the Jews.  

There is also drama between a painter and his girl who sees herself in direct contest with his work, a young man who feels he is due his inheritance early and wants to spend it on one of the Spanish dancers being pimped out to the passengers, and even a dog that is given more privileges at the captain’s table than some of the men. Stanley Kramer is going after everything under the sun in this film and not all of it is hitting. 

For starters, because there are so many different stories going on all at the same time, there isn’t enough time to dedicate to each of them. This works fine when the narrative is as a whole, but not all of the storylines have the same agenda. This makes us care little for many of these characters because there is so little time to get to know the nuances of their problems. It’s disappointing because these are some of the greats of the silver screen being directed by the often amazing Stanley Kramer. 

But even Kramer struggles under the weight of all this. We get token moments of brilliance injected into it, such as the aforementioned dog being thrown overboard. One of the Spaniards, a man who loves animals, loses his life to save the dog, but the owners are more concerned for their pet than the man who just died. It’s a potentially powerful moment that is marred just a bit by how little we got to know the man who died. In an attempt to bring it home, a line of dialogue is spoken to remind us of whom it was that made this sacrifice, but it would have been so much more potent had we gotten to know this character more beforehand instead. 

By the end of the film, our passengers depart into a Germany bedecked with the flag of the Nazis, entering a Germany that is rapidly shifting into a world most of them are now foreign to. Glocken, who is perhaps the most philosophical of the bunch, breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience with the line “What has all this to do with us?… Nothing.” I concur. 

Ship of Fools is not boring. At two and a half hours long, it mercifully wasn’t that. But it felt like a feature-length soap opera of dramas and petty arguments amongst an elite group of passengers and a few of the second class. Without the moralizing injected into the whole affair, it would have probably been a throwaway film in the end. The commentary on the rise of fascism and the clear divide between the different views on Germany from its own citizens of the 1930s, coupled with reminders that racism wasn’t just a thing in Germany, elevated it back in the day. But it doesn’t hold up as well to modern viewers. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Stanley Kramer

Best Actor: Oskar Werner

Best Actress: Simone Signoret

Best Supporting Actor: Michael Dunn

Best Screenplay - Based on Material from Another Medium: Abby Mann

Best Art Direction - Black-and-White: Robert Clatworthy and Joseph Kish (won)

Best Cinematography - Black-and-White: Ernest Laszlo (won)

Best Costume Design - Black-and-White: Jean Louis and Bill Thomas

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Release Date: July 29, 1965

Running Time: 150 Minutes

Not Rated

Starring: Vivien Leigh, Simone Signoret, José Ferrer, Lee Marvin, Oskar Werner, Elizabeth Ashley, George Segal, José Greco, Michael Dunn, Charles Korvin, Heinz Rühmann, and Lilia Skala

Directed by: Stanley Kramer