Ship of Fools

Don't look now, but as you might expect with message-mad Kramer at the helm of this adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter's novel, there's a heavy allegory aboard: it's 1933, the ship is German, and there's a Jew among the mixed bag of passengers. Yards and yards of liberal cliché are relentlessly unfolded, but the superb cast - struggling valiantly with the sort of problems more at home in disaster movies - make it almost watchable. Among them are Signoret as a drug-addicted countess mournfully loving the ship's doctor (Werner), Vivien Leigh as a divorcee looking for a last fling before middle-age sets in, and Michael Dunn as a marvellously sharp-tongued dwarf who finds himself in a minority group of two with the Jew (Rhümann).