Word: melodrama
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SHIP OF FOOLS. This flashy popular melodrama by Producer-Director Stanley Kramer out of Novelist Katherine Anne Porter's mordant allegory concerns a German vessel bound from Veracruz to Bremerhaven during the early 1930s. Despite the Meaningful Dialogue they have to spout, Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Simone Signoret and Oskar Werner provide fast company for the long haul...
...passengers were pimps, bigots, weaklings and other morally rumpled types, booked from Veracruz to Bremerhaven on the German vessel Vera during the early 1930s. Skirting the allegorical deeps, Producer-Director Stanley Kramer and Scenarist Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg) have turned Ship into just another showboat-a flashy popular melodrama, acted with everyman-for-himself urgency by a troupe of scintillating international stars...
...spied his American watch. Inevitably, the tedeschi leave a voluptuous collaborator (Raffaella Carra) reclining in the caboose. Sinatra spurns her advances, and when she tries to escape, he regretfully mows her down, simultaneously thumbing his nose at his own public image and giving this rolling-stock melodrama at least one swift, strong, indisputable moment of truth...
...best, this earnest little melodrama resembles a bantam version of The Longest Day. Again the pin-up role is assigned to Irina Demick, described unpersuasively as "a girl who blows up bridges" for the French Resistance. When the Allies throng ashore, Irina and a doughty band of villagers who have sallied forth as a welcoming committee are being held hostage by the Germans. The G.I.s who liberate them include wry-smiling Sergeant Cliff Robertson and the inevitable New York Jewish joker (Red Buttons) assigned to all units for comedy relief. Since the village is under siege, Cliff is ordered...
...Jeanne Moreau. And except for some wonderfully grey and wintry views of Venice, this long, turgid melodrama has little else to recommend it. Made in Italy in 1962 by Director Joseph Losey (The Servant), Eva describes how a malicious, luxury-class harlot (Moreau) coolly destroys a famous Welsh author (Stanley Baker) who never amounted to much in the first place. The man is a loser whose reputation rests on a novel he stole from his dead brother. By the time the woman finishes with him, his exquisite wife (Virna Lisi) has committed suicide and the writer is reduced to loud...