Rough Crossing

Ship of Fools. In her mordant 1962 bestseller, Novelist Katherine Anne Porter unsparingly scrutinized what she described as "the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity." Her passengers were pimps, bigots, weaklings and other morally rumpled types, booked from Veracruz to Bremerhaven on the German vessel Vera during the early 1930s. Skirting the allegorical deeps, Producer-Director Stanley Kramer and Scenarist Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg) have turned Ship into just another showboat--a flashy popular melodrama, acted with everyman-for-himself urgency by a troupe of scintillating international stars.

Director Kramer, who seldom resorts to nuance when an overstatement will do, gets off to a bumbling start when Actor Michael Dunn, a 78-lb. dwarf, clambers onto the ship's rail to announce: "I'm Herr Glocken, and this is a ship of fools." Wading through heavy condensations of Miss Porter's prose, his fellow travelers check in to introduce themselves: the troubled and tire some young American lovers (Elizabeth Ashley, George Segal), a band of down-at-the-heel flamenco dancers led by Jose Greco, an anti-Semitic Nazi publisher (Jose Ferrer), a gentle Jewish salesman (Germany's Heinz Ruehmann) who can believe no evil of a nation that produced Goethe, Beethoven and Bach. Muses the worldly-wise ship's doctor (Germany's Oskar Werner) with deadly accuracy: "I've seen all these people before. They're on a ship, that's all."

Fortunately, the film's most fascinating characters are too busy searching for love, sex and other gratifications to devote much time to easy platitudes about German guilt. Werner, as a man dying of heart disease, conceives a wasting fondness for la Condesa (Simone Signoret), an exiled Spanish noblewoman who trades her favors for narcotics. Their scenes together, a duet of eye-to-eye messages that make dialogue seem beside the point, are showstoppers of stunning subtlety.

No less masterful is Lee Marvin's raw but incisive portrayal of a broken-down ballplayer who compresses his whole wretched life into a drunken, sobbing outburst about his inability to hit a curve ball on the outside corner. His table partner is an aging, embittered divorcee (Vivien Leigh), who reacts with exquisite distaste to a recital of his gastric misadventures in Mexico. Many scenes later, in a fit of sexual combustion, she beats Marvin nearly insensible with the heel of her gilded slipper.

These four performances alone make Ship of Fools an event, but Kramer too often cuts away to supporting players who lurch along the decks and passageways spouting Meaningful Dialogue. The worst lines ("You know how frustrating it is to reach out for something, and then you find it isn't there") entangle Ashley and Segal, whose love life consists mostly of Social Significance. He, a man of the people, sketches the wretched Cuban sugar workers sweltering away in steerage. She, a girl of polish, prefers nice portraits, or maybe landscapes. Their conflict is resolved in bed, where the masses can't come between them. Such Abby Mannerisms help transform a substantial work of art into a second-rung work of artifice, never quite worthy of those Ship passengers who deserve to travel first class.

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