Ship of Fools

In 1933, an ocean liner belonging to a second-rate German company is making a 26-day voyage from Veracruz, Mexico to Bremerhaven, Germany. Along the way it will stop in Cuba to pick up a large group of Spanish farm laborers who are being shipped home and will be housed like cattle in steerage. It will also pick up La Condesa, a Spanish countess. It will stop in Tenerife, where the farm workers will disembark and La Condesa will be sent to a German-run prison for her "traitorous" activities in Cuba. This voyage will be the last of three for the ship's doctor, Willi Schumann, who has a serious heart ailment and thought he could find some meaning to his life through this job. Willi and La Condesa fall in love, but the ship's Captain Thiele, Willi's closest friend on board, believes that drug-addicted La Condesa is only using him to get her fixes. Willi and La Condesa must figure out if they have a future after the voyage, as Willi has a wife and sons back in Bremerhaven. The other passengers include: Mary Treadwell, a middle-aged American divorcee who is trying to recapture her youth; Tenny, a middle-aged American ex-baseball player who laments that he never made it big in the game; young American couple David and Jenny, who are in love but must overcome differences in social standing and life outlooks; Rieber, a middle-aged German Nazi sympathizer who is traveling with a young female companion and lords his beliefs over the other German passengers, who are either absorbed in their own lives or just don't care to notice what's happening in Germany with the Nazis; and Lowenthal and Glocken, a German Jew and a German dwarf who are "paired" as the outsiders among those in first class. Their encounters, plus those with a rambunctious pair of children, two German teenagers who are coming into their sexual being but having problems overcoming issues they face, and a troupe of gypsy entertainers whose women are pimped out by their leader, make for an interesting voyage.