Ship Of Fools [HD]

Excellent adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter novel
A stunning, powerful examination of how racism and xenophopia, if unchecked, can overtake society, Ship of Fools is set aboard a German liner sailing from Mexico to Bemerhaven just after the Nazis have taken over. Among the passengers are Vivien Leigh as an embittered divorcee, Lee Marvin as a down-on-his-luck baseball player, George Segal and Elizabeth Ashley as an artist and his lover, Jose Ferrer as a vociferous anti-Semite, Simone Signoret as a Contessa having an affair with ship's doctor Oskar Werner, and Michael Dunn as Greek Chorus. With few exceptions, the entire cast is terrific. Leigh, in her last film, seemingly assimilated all the heartache of her life into this role, and her Charleston near the end is a highlight. The standouts, in my opinion, are Signoret and Werner; they inject their love affair, obviously doomed from the start, with an emotionalism that is genuinely heartbreaking. Ship of Fools is undeniably Stanley Kramer's finest hour as a director,...

A blue ribbon film with excellent character portrayals
Given its setting of sundry characters en route to Germany from Mexico, this film could have easily degenerated into something predictable, mawkish and trite. Instead, it is a truly fabulous cinematic work, with flesh-and-blood characers whose various predicaments, interwoven against the burgeoning Nazi sentiment of the early 1930s, grab the viewer from the very start. As Glocken, the "little person" who delivers a welcoming narrative, said: there's a ball player, a doctor, dog lovers, emancipated ladies and others whose assorted problems unravel themselves and somehow get resolved through the weeks of the sea journey. Simone Signoret and Oskar Werner deliver bravura performances as doomed lovers, while middle-aged disillusioned socialite Vivien Leigh turns in a wonderfully tart portrayal of a closet romantic hidden beneath a sarcastic facade. Lee Marvin is also good as a rough, contemptible athlete whose unmannerly words and actions manage to alienate just about...

A Voyage Not To Be Missed
It's a cliche to say it, but it's true - they don't make movies like this anymore. Ship of Fools is an intelligent film populated by a variety of beautifully drawn characters portrayed by a cast of actors who know the subtle art of making their interior feelings exterior. Abby Mann's splendid script is based on a book by Katherine Anne Porter and makes some of the usual concessions of adaptations - the hunchback in the book becomes a dwarf in the film, for instance. But the themes and passions remain intact - and the characters and their emotions are as involving now as they were when the film was first released back in the sixties.

Often called a kind of floating Grand Hotel, the ship of the title is a second rate tub taking its crew and disparate collection of passengers from Mexico to Germany in the uncertain days of the mid-1930's. The impending doom of World War II and the Holocaust loom large for everybody to see, but the mostly self-centered characters remain oblivious to all...

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