SHIP OF FOOLS
US, 1965, 146 minutes, Black and white.
Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Oskar Werner, Simone Signoret, Jose Ferrer, George Segal, Elizabeth Ashley, Michael Dunn, Lilia Skala.
Directed by Stanley Kramer.
Ship of Fools is based on (Katherine Ann Porter's best-seller. It was brought to the screen by screenwriter Abbey Mann and producer/director Stanley Kramer, the team responsible for Judgment at Nuremburg. Some critics. including a most devastating essay by Pauline Kae1, reprinted in her "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang" blast the film and its makers for the pro-Jewish, anti-German propagandizing.
Clearly Ship of Fools 1s a moral fable and explicitly sets out to be such a film with the ship's passengers a microcosm of the 30s. Characters are also clearly symbolic and, on these premises, the film works.
Audiences will probably enjoy seeing so many stars - this was Vivien Leigh's last role. Oskar Werner was nominated for an Oscar - but lost to Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou.
Stanley Kramer is a popular message director (generally hit by critics): The Defiant Ones, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Bless the Beasts and Children.
1. Ship of fools is obviously a symbolic title for a film. Was it apt? What was its significance?
2. The film uses a fairly straightforward and explicit moralising tone and style. It this successful? Would a more subtle style have been more successful? Why?
3. The ship is meant to be a microcosm. Were the passengers a cross-section of the world?
4. The setting was the 1930s, the destination Germany on the eve of a war. How important was this particular setting for the theme of the film?
5. What was significant for the theme of the film in the voyage itself: the types of passengers, separation of classes, the Spanish people, the role and attitudes of captain and crew?
6. Clearly, the types of person on board and the interaction of the types offer the bases for reflection on the significance of a ship of fools. Discussion of each reveals how the film works and what it wants to say:
- the Captain: strengths, weaknesses, the table, his relationship with the doctor, Germanic.
- the Doctor: personality, background, dedication, relating to people, the Contessa, the change in his life by love for her, reflections on life, the significance of his death, the loneliness of his coffin.
- the Contessa: her dignity, abuse, background, deportation, drug dependence, loneliness, love for the doctor, her wisdom with age, her future on the Canaries, what had the voyage done for her?
- the divorcee: bitterness, perpetual flirt, American, background, basic attitude to life and people, drink, relationship with Lee Marvin; had she changed at all by the end of the voyage?
- the American: "typical", baseball, drink, anti-intellectual, tough, race prejudice, brutal. Did he learn anything during the voyage?
- the Jewish salesman: happy, tolerant, persecuted, a gentleman, a gentle ‘stirrer’, the irony of his statements about the Ghetto.
- the German: ideological arrogance, sharing the cabin with a Jew, his offensiveness.
- the man with the Jewish wife: his attacks on hypocrisy and breakdown.
- the artist and his girl-friend: art and life, their relationship, its destructiveness, learning how to relate.
- the young man with the religious uncle: his naivety, his use of money, his infatuation with the flamenco dancer, their cruelty towards him.
- the woman with the dog.
- the dwarf: as a dwarf, his observations, his conversation with Marvin. Why is it he that points the moral?
Do these people add up to a ship of fools? Which conversations were most memorable? What religious aspects of
life were discussed? God? What was the importance of the wood carver?
On arrival in Germany, life resumed as if the meaning of the voyage was in another world. Was this part of the message?
