It has become fashionable to deride Stanley Kramer as nothing more than a maker of turgid polemics and his early standing as a director of intelligent trailblazers passed quickly and, despite its success at the Oscars, by the time he got around to making "Ship of Fools" the critics really had it in for him. It may be no masterpiece and despite its subject, (antisemitism), it's no trailblazer but it's certainly intelligent, superbly acted, (particularly by Oskar Werner and Simone Signoret), and a fairly faithful rendering of Katherine Anne Porter's novel; Abby Mann did the outstanding screenplay working with sometimes highly melodramatic material.
The setting is a liner on its way from Vera Cruz to Germany in 1933 with the kind of sundry group of passengers on board you might find in a mini-series. They are a mixture of Germans, a few Americans, (including Vivien Leigh in her last film as an amalgam of Blanche Du Bois and Mrs. Stone), and for dramatic purposes the obligatory Jews, ostracized and heading unknowingly perhaps to a concentration camp.
Mercifully, these are more than mere stereotypes thanks to a superb cast, (Kramer was always a good actor's director). The problem is we've met them all before and since and more successfully. Nevertheless, whatever its faults Werner, in a career-best performance, and Signoret together raise it to the level of art whenever they are on screen. It's a joy to watch acting this good.
No comments:
Post a Comment