Better In Your Head?--SHIP OF FOOLS

 

Spoiler Alert: we all ship it.

THE BOOK-Written by Katherine Anne Porter, released 1962

THE MOVIE-Directed by Stanley Kramer, written by Abby Mann, released 1965

THE STORY-Come along and ride on a kaleidoscopic voyage with the civilized world's most pressed people! Thoughts of "the glorious future" dominate the collective present. Little do they know, stability is a thing of the past.

MIND THE GAP-Short story specialist Porter started work on her first and only novel in 1940. Twenty-two years later, her whip-smart masterpiece was released to massive fanfare. Inevitably, the movie rights sold for an absurd sum--$4.5 million in today's American dollar. 

Allegory ahoy! The story of a German passenger ship sailing from Mexico to Europe in the summer of 1931, carrying fifty well-offs meandering around the upper deck and nine-hundred deported workers crammed into steerage practically adjures sociological analysis. Power and privilege boil above; poverty and pain simmer below. Whether German, Spaniard, American, Cuban or Mexican, the passengers are united in woeful ignorance. The enemy is the other, ever-present, ever-growing and ever-ready to conquer and consume. The other would steal a meal from a starving child, would deny medicine to a dying mother. The other must be fought by doing what is demanded. Desires must make way for duties. To refuse responsibility, to resist tradition, is to dishonor one's very bloodline.

It is in such conditions that fascism rises and flourishes. Porter's text offers no answers, only reflections. In so doing, she shows an immaculate comprehension of the artistic imperative.

Lovely language only goes so far in film. Characters must be established quicker, cheaper. The sizable cast is headlined by Vivian Leigh's depressingly believable turn as fragile, love-tossed Mrs. Treadwell. Only Lee Marvin (as a bitter, washed-up ex-ballplayer) and Michael Dunn (as the charming fourth-wall breaker of uncommon height) distinguish themselves otherwise. Jose Ferrer fumbled his chance to make Herr Rieber one of cinema's classic assholes, and I've yet to come across a compelling argument for Oskar Werner's Oscar nomination.

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-Ship Of Fools is a book to read through once, then sporadically thereafter. A marvel of thematic unity, but also dense and debilitating. Adapting one of the century's most ambitious bestsellers is not a task for the faint of heart or feeble of mind. The decision to film in black-and-white staved off potential sensory overload and laid bare the message, but without Porter's magnificent prose ("the divine narcotic of hope," mwahhh) the movie descends into a grueling placidity. 

The book is a diamond, clean and stunning in its complexity. The film is mature and forgettable--soapstone.