📽️ I kicked off the weekend with another movie, “Ship of Fools” dir. Stanley Kramer (Columbia Pictures, 1965). Set in early 1933, it is based on Katherine Anne Porter’s 1962 novel by the same title about a trip on a German liner she took from Veracruz to Bremerhaven by way of Cuba and Spain.

The film covers many topics, including class, race, gender, sex, domestic violence, political and economic oppression, parental authority, migrant labor, deportation, social consciousness, classism. middle age, youth, drug addiction, sex work, Nazis, eugenics, prejudice, extreme poverty, extreme wealth, ambition, success, failure, regret, guilt, love, artifice, authenticity, laughter, self-pitty, sorrow, malaise, and joy.

There is also German culture, of course, including different kinds of music, and represented most positively by a Jew. This proud Iron Cross recipient loves the best of his homeland and sees the best in it too, despite obvious prejudice and unsettling portents. Meanwhile, the “real” Germans sit at the captain’s table, a place the captain himself can’t bear to frequent, but where a dog is seated among the humans.

A bit soapy in places for my taste, it is nonetheless as topical as ever, perhaps more so. A dwarf closes out the film after their arrival in Germany by anticipating a question on viewers' minds: “What has all this to do with us?” His answer is “Nothing,” even as he seems to mean: “Everything, you fools, but you won’t grasp it, just as we fools haven’t.”