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. Among the many passengers are Vivien as a divorce 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 ballplayers, 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.