domino harvey wrote:Ship of Fools Exactly as subtle as you'd expect a Stanley Kramer film about… wait, what is this mess supposed to be about? Set aboard a German ocean liner circa 1933, the picture opens promisingly with a fun title sequence, so I briefly held out hope that this might not be as self-important as Kramer's other films. Then the film proper begins as Michael Dunn's dwarf rests his arms on the ship's railing and informs the audience that he's aboard a literal ship of fools and we should look for ourself amongst the travelers shown. Well, I tried, but I don't think I really fit any of these:
+ The aging American woman, disgracefully portrayed by Vivien Leigh, who is so despondent at the passage of time on her once youthful looks that she explodes with fury only when Lee Marvin's drunk lech
stops raping her. This character has earlier been introduced as a victim of spousal abuse and spent the moments immediately preceding the rape dolling herself up in the mirror in deliberate clown pantomime. No, that's not me. Or anyone. Who would knowingly concoct a character arc like that on purpose?
+ The oafish Nazi sympathizer, played by the usually reliable Jose Ferrer, who hates Jews on principle and proposes killing everyone over the age of sixty while at the exclusive Captain's Table surrounded by mostly old women, because, like, the Nazis were just so clueless as to how ridiculous they sounded!!! If you are worried that as a member of the audience for a Stanley Kramer film you might be too dumb to know which are the good guys and which the bad, Kramer even makes it easy for you to visually decode the suuuuuuper complex subtext:
+ The bickering young lovers who can't make it work because dammit, he's a socially conscious bohemian who wants his wife to devote herself selflessly to his endeavors. Wait, what? That doesn't make sense. Maybe this is me. Am I lazy fucking filmmaking?
+ How about the blindly optimistic Jewish man who's segregated from others on board but is still cheerful, since he's a proud German. This leads to the single worst shot-reverse shot in film history, a moment so cheap and nonsensical in any context other than its function in feeding a condescending superiority on the part of the viewer that it is beyond contempt. I have captured the exchange below because otherwise I think no one would believe it really happened. It did:
+ There's also the pimp, the prostitute, the man with the Jewish wife who gets kicked out of the inner circle and pitches a tanty, the aryan sexpot, the thieving virgin who threatens his wheelchair-bound father for money to pay the whore, the perfectly attractive "ugly duckling" young girl, the revolutionary socialite, the good doctor, the woman who values her dog more than the life of an anonymous day laborer, &c &c &c. Wait, I've figured it out. I know which one's me: I'm the guy who jumped overboard rather than be stuck with all these morose caricatures!
This is a film that wallows in the overly simplified miseries of the figures it depicts and feeds into the darkest, most regrettable aspects of liberalness. It may or may not be the worst Stanley Kramer film of all time, but it's most definitely the worst to be nominated for Best Picture. The best thing about finishing this whole viewing exercise is the sweet knowledge that I will never ever have to intentionally watch a Stanley Kramer film ever again. Now there's the happiest of endings a film lover could hope for!
