Stanley Kramer and scriptwriter Abby Mann translate Katherine Anne Porter's novel of pre-World War II Europe into a kind of Grand Hotel of the high seas, a floating vehicle for some great stars including Vivien Leigh in her final screen performance. She portrays an aging, disillusioned beauty sailing none-too-gracefully toward death on what Porter called "the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity," actually an ocean liner traveling from Veracruz to Bremerhaven in the year 1933. The novel's subtle evocation of the pre-Nazi mentality is sketched in rather broad strokes in the film, with Jose Ferrer and Lee Marvin stealing scenes as a Jew-baiting German businessman and a vulgar American who can't even play baseball anymore, respectively. But the central figure of the metaphor, the ship's doctor Schumann (Oskar Werner), with his dope-addicted lover (Simone Signoret), still poignantly underscores the frustration of that obsolete character--the intelligent human being--whose sheer exhaustion helped usher in the Holocaust. Michael Dunn took the Oscar for his performance as the philosophizing dwarf Glocken, the only passenger with true claim to the title Fool.