Based on the novel by Katherine Anne Porter (which became a national best-seller within days of its publication), Ship Of Fools is set in 1933 aboard a luxury liner bound from Mexico to Germany. Amoung the many passengers are Vivien Leigh (in only her third American film, following her Oscar winning roles in Gone With The Wind. Best Actress 1940 and A Streetcar Named Desire, Best Actress 1952) as a divorcee desperate for love and lost youth. Also starring are Simone Signoret as a Spanish noblewoman being deported as a political prisoner, Lee Marvin as an aging, alcoholic ballplayer, and Jose Ferrer as a budding Nazi whose brutishness foreshadows the holocaust to come. Their separate but interlocking stories, beautifully observed by director Stanley Kramer, serve as a brilliant microcosm of a world on the verge of war.

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