Ship of Fools (1965) Review
8/10
A ship crosses the Atlantic in 1933 with a mixed passenger list of Germans, Americans, Spaniards, a Jewish salesman and six hundred Spanish workers being deported in steerage. The voyage is the entire film. Almost nothing happens in plot terms. People talk, drink, form attachments, gamble, and reveal what they think about each other. The audience knows what year it is and none of them do.
I find this film gripping in a way that has nothing to do with plot. It’s two and a half hours of people talking on a boat, and I hang on nearly every conversation because I know what 1933 means and they don’t.
When it’s good, the dread is almost unbearable. When Kramer starts explaining himself, I want to throw something at the screen.
Katherine Anne Porter spent twenty years writing the novel and it was a considerable literary event when it finally appeared in 1962. Stanley Kramer bought it immediately. That was his pattern.
The 8 is for a film that trusts a confined setting and a first-rate cast to carry two and a half hours with almost no incident. The dwarf narrator framing is heavy-handed, several subplots go nowhere, and Kramer’s instinct for the on-the-nose line surfaces more than once. The central conversations are extraordinary.
The Date Is the Suspense
1933 is established early and then barely mentioned again, and it does all the work in the film.
Every casual remark about Germany lands with a weight the characters can’t feel. Every mild expression of prejudice. Every reasonable man explaining that the situation is being exaggerated by people with an interest in exaggerating it.
Lowenthal, the Jewish salesman played by Heinz Ruhmann, is the most chilling figure in the picture because he’s hopeful. He’s certain it’ll pass. He points out that there are too many of them, that he fought in the war, that Germany is a civilized country and this is a passing unpleasantness.
The film never contradicts him. It doesn’t need to. It simply lets him be reasonable, at length, to a man who has just told him he can no longer sit at the captain’s table. The other side of it is Rieber, the publisher, who’s already a Nazi and says so cheerfully. Jose Ferrer plays him without any of the usual signals: no menace, no relish, just a man with opinions he considers obvious and a plan for the Jews he describes at dinner as a matter of hygiene.
Their scenes together are the film, and they’re the reason the 8 exists. A man is told, politely, over drinks, what’s going to happen to him, and he declines to believe it because believing it would be unreasonable. I find those exchanges harder to sit through than most horror movies, and Ferrer’s cheerfulness is what makes them so awful.
Historical irony is the cheapest and most powerful tool available in period work, and it costs nothing but restraint. Establish the date and then let your characters be wrong about the future in ordinary, defensible ways. The critical rule is that no character may sense what’s coming. The moment one does, the reader stops supplying the dread and starts watching a prophet, and prophets are boring because they’ve already done the work. Lowenthal isn’t blind, he’s applying reasonable inference to available evidence and arriving at the wrong answer. That’s what everybody did.
The test is to check whether your period characters would sound the same if they didn’t know the outcome. Write their dialogue, then ask whether a person in 1933 could plausibly have said it without hindsight. Anything that carries a foreshadowing charge has to go, because the reader’s knowledge is the entire effect and your characters adding to it dilutes it.
The Ship as a Fixed Society
The passenger list is the point. A liner in 1933 sorted people by class and nationality automatically, seated them together at dinner for the length of a crossing, and gave them nowhere else to go. So the film gets a functioning cross-section of pre-war Europe with a built-in reason for all of them to keep talking to each other, and Kramer uses that fully. There are no coincidences required. The dinner seating plan is the plot.
The captain’s table is a hierarchy made visible. Who’s invited, who’s moved, who’s removed, and the moment Lowenthal is relocated is the film’s clearest statement about how these things proceed: administratively, apologetically, and without anybody raising their voice. The steerage passengers below are visible throughout and almost never spoken to. Six hundred Spanish laborers being deported after a failed sugar crop, on the same ship, in the same weather, and the film keeps cutting to them. That’s its own statement and Kramer doesn’t underline it. They’re cargo, and the people upstairs discussing politics over dinner don’t consider them part of the discussion.
The doctor, played by Oskar Werner, is the one character who crosses between decks, and it kills him. He treats the steerage passengers, has a heart condition, and the film is precise that his decency has a physical cost.
Werner is the performance I’d point people to first after Leigh. He plays the doctor’s decency as something tired and costly, and I think his trips below decks carry more conscience than all the political talk upstairs put together.
Vivien Leigh’s Last Performance
She plays Mary Treadwell, a divorced woman in her forties who’s aware that her looks have been the only currency she was ever given and that the account is closing.
The performance is unsentimental and she plays it without any request for sympathy. Treadwell is vain, cruel when drunk, funny, and entirely clear-eyed about her own situation, which she describes to a stranger in one of the film’s best scenes.
The corridor sequence is difficult to watch. She dances alone, drunk, in a state, and then beats a man with a shoe when he mistakes her for available. It’s the closest the film comes to violence and it’s over in seconds. That corridor scene is the one I can’t shake. Leigh gives it everything, and the shoe comes down so fast that the shock lands before I’ve processed what I’m seeing. It’s the rawest thing in the film, and it’s why I’d tell anyone curious about her late work to start here.
Leigh was fifty-one, in poor health, and had been managing bipolar illness and tuberculosis for years. Accounts from the production describe her as sometimes difficult and sometimes brilliant, and both are visible. It was her final film. She died two years later at fifty-three, and that her last role is a woman confronting the end of what she was valued for isn’t something the film could have known and is impossible to ignore.
She won no award for it. Simone Signoret was nominated instead, from the same film, along with Werner and Michael Dunn.
What the Film Cannot Do
Porter’s novel is nearly five hundred pages with dozens of point-of-view characters, and its method is accumulation. Nobody is a protagonist and the reader assembles a portrait of a continent from fragments. A film can’t do that in two and a half hours, so Abby Mann’s screenplay selects perhaps eight threads and gives them arcs. That’s the correct compromise and is also a loss.
The threads it keeps are the strongest: Lowenthal and Rieber, Treadwell, the doctor and the countess, the American couple. The ones it thins are the German family and most of the steerage material.
The framing device is the film’s real failure. Michael Dunn plays Glocken, a dwarf passenger who addresses the audience directly at the start and end to explain that this is a ship of fools and we’re probably on it. He’s good in the part and the device is unnecessary. The film has spent two hours showing the point and doesn’t need a narrator to state it. That’s Kramer’s recurring weakness across his career. Everything between those two speeches is better than either of them. Glocken’s closing address drives me up the wall, because the film has just spent two hours showing me the point and then a narrator steps up to explain it as if I’d dozed off. Dunn deserved a better job than holding up the sign.
A framing narrator who explains your theme will cost you more than it gives, and this film is a clean example because the material either side of the device is so strong. Two hours of demonstration are undercut by ninety seconds of statement.
The reason writers add them is anxiety about being understood, and the anxiety is usually misplaced. If the reader has followed eight interlocking threads across a crossing, they have understood. The narrator is insurance against a failure that didn’t occur, and it announces that you didn’t trust the work.
Delete your framing material and read the piece without it. If the meaning survives, leave it out permanently. If it doesn’t, the problem is in the body of the work and a narrator will only conceal it. That’s worse than leaving it visible where you might have fixed it.
Kramer and the Message Picture
Stanley Kramer made his career on issue films and this is one of the better ones. That requires acknowledging what the form does badly.
He made The Defiant Ones, Judgment at Nuremberg, Inherit the Wind, On the Beach and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and every one of them has the same virtue and the same fault. The virtue is that he took subjects nobody else would finance. The fault is that he didn’t trust an audience to arrive at a conclusion unassisted.
Here the fault shows in three places: the narrator, one speech from the doctor about complicity, and a closing line that spells out the title. Everything else is left alone. That’s more restraint than he usually managed. The virtue shows in the casting and the talk. Kramer hired serious actors and gave them long scenes, and he was willing to make a film in 1965 in which a Nazi explains his plans at dinner and nobody stops him.
The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won two, both technical, and it’s largely dropped out of circulation while the worse Kramer films are still shown. That neglect is unfair. This is Kramer at his most restrained, and I’d much rather people saw this one than the films where he lectures the whole way through.
What survives is the conversation. Strip the frame off and you have two and a half hours of Europe talking itself into something. That’s a better film than the one Kramer thought he was making.
A body of work can have one recurring flaw and still be worth studying, and identifying it precisely is more useful than a verdict. Kramer’s fault is always the same: a line, a speech or a frame that states what the scene has already shown, inserted because he didn’t trust the audience.
The reason to name it’s that it’s the commonest fault in serious writing, and it arrives at exactly the moment you’ve done your best work. You write a scene that carries an argument, feel a flicker of doubt that anybody will notice, and add a sentence to make sure. That sentence is the damage.
As a test, find every place in your draft where a character or narrator articulates the point of the passage they’re in. Delete each one and reread. In almost every case the passage will be stronger, and in the rare case where meaning collapses, you’ve located a scene that wasn’t doing its job and can fix the cause instead of the symptom.
Should you watch Ship of Fools?
Yes, and it asks patience. Nothing happens for long stretches and the narrator grates at both ends. I give it an 8 because the Lowenthal and Rieber conversations are as good as anything I’ve seen on film about people talking themselves out of the obvious, and Leigh’s last work deserves an audience. Knock off the frame and a couple of dead-end subplots and I’d be arguing for a 9.
