In "Morituri," Captain Mueller(Yul Brynner) is incensed at having been demoted to being skipper of a boat taking 7000 tons of rubber to German occupied France, not to mention the political prisoners that will also be working in the engine room. To keep him placated, his superiors threaten him with wrecking his son's
career if he does not cooperate. He would be even less happier if he knew that his new political officer is actually Robert Crain(Marlon Brando), a German engineer who deserted on the eve of war to India where he is being gleefully blackmailed by Colonel Statter(Trevor Howard). He not only wants the rubber to not reach its intended destination, but also wants the Allies to have it, ordering Crain to scuttle the scuttling devices, of which he has no idea where on board they might be.
There is a great movie in "Morituri" just waiting to get out but it just does not entirely pull it off and put all of the pieces together. However, it is fun watching Brando and Brynner play a high stakes game of cat and mouse between two characters who are in the same boat, so to speak. So, on the one hand, there is a lot of old fashioned intrigue, but in the last half hour, reality creeps steadily in, almost from another movie entirely. I know this is meant to give the pacifist Crain a sense of purpose, but he seems to be doing pretty well up until then. The movie made in 1965, might have included this more as information intended towards the audience which might have been more ignorant of the Holocaust than we are now.
May 12, 2010
