Morituri [DVD]

That Morituri didn't exactly set the box-office alight in 1965 can be gauged from the fact that it's known under at least three titles (Saboteur and The Saboteur - Codename: "Morituri" - which isn't actually the anti-hero's codename!). Taking its title from the famed gladiator's address `We who are about to die salute you,' it's a surprising seabound reunion of veterans of the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty who you'd think would know better and certainly wouldn't even want to see each other again, let alone board another ship after that famously nightmarish shoot. While Trevor Howard had the good sense to remain on dry land in a lengthy cameo, Brando soon resorted to type, demanding rewrites, refusing to memorise his lines or hit his marks and generally making producer Aaron Rosenberg and director Bernhard Wicki's life hell as the film drifted increasingly over budget and over schedule before slowly sinking with all hands at the box-office.

Brando's Crain/Kyle is a peace-loving, somewhat Bohemian German exile living under an assumed identity in India who finds himself blackmailed into going undercover as a Nazi by Trevor Howard's ruthless British intelligence officer ("You're a cold b*****d," snipes Brando: "I was born on a chilly island," replies Howard in the film's best exchange). His mission isn't to sabotage and sink a German freighter with a vital cargo of rubber but to prevent it from being scuttled so the Allies can claim the cargo for their own war effort. Since much of the crew is made up of criminals and political undesirables less than eager to return to Germany, he finds himself occupying an intriguing moral grey area: Kyle's first and most useful ally is not found among the allied prisoners of war (many holding Janet Margolin's Jewish survivor of their torpedoed ship in as much open contempt as the Nazis) or Brynner's aggressively apolitical captain, but rather takes the form of the ship's second officer and most fanatical Nazi Party member Martin Benrath. The film isn't blind to the moral ironies and dramatic possibilities this presents and throws in numerous interesting spins and obstacles to his task, yet while it's not a bad film at all it's never really as thrilling or compelling as it should be.

Part of the problem is Brando, who had by then moved into that period of his career when he was increasingly bored with just delivering a solid performance and increasingly felt need to make his parts more eccentric to keep himself interested. It's a long way from the surreal self-indulgence of later films and it's not an especially bad performance, but rather than doing what the film requires you often get the feeling that you're watching him go through acting exercises as he drifts in and out of the film that everyone else is making. As a result it's Brynner, giving a typically arrogant and stentorian turn in a role originally intended for Lee J. Cobb who comes across as the more convincing screen presence despite having much less screen time and much less to work with.

It's on a technical level that the film impresses the most. The Oscar-nominated black and white camerawork is often astounding, with some of the most technically ambitious and flawlessly executed helicopter shots ever achieved on film, often moving from extreme long shots of the ship at sea into close-ups of characters on deck before tracking with them along the decks. In an age before Wescams or CGI the sheer physical difficulties in getting such remarkably smooth shots must have been extraordinary - between the seas and the wind alone hitting the right marks and focus points on a moving ship should have been next to impossible - making them all the more impressive, so it's a shame that at times the DVD transfer overcompensates for the deep blacks that are one of cinematographer Conrad Hall's trademarks and noticeably regrades and softens the contrast in some shots. Jerry Goldsmith's score fares better, its haunting East European main title played on the zither as ominous strings build up in the background doing services in a variety of guises alongside some striking action cues using the same mixture of rapid pared-down percussion, driving piano work and electronics that would become a hallmark of his Man From U.N.C.L.E. scores.

It's a shame that the infamous short film 'Meet Marlon Brando' about the star's increasingly peculiar behavior on the film's press tour (hitting on a passing black woman in a rather patronising attempt to make a point about racism, being typically vague at a press conference and offering the words of wisdom that "You won't know how to proceed in life unless you see Morituri.") isn't included alongside the film's two theatrical trailers on the Region 1 NTSC DVD.

"Morituri" didn't do well on its release. This is both a shame and not suprising. The main problem is that the initial idea for the film, an intriguing and distinctly different riff on the sabotage idea, peters out halfway through, leaving the film's makers to cobble together an ending that clearly doesen't match up with the first half.
The plot, briefly, is this: Lotus-eating, beachcombing, pacifist German Robert Craine (Brando) is living in India during the war and trying to stay out of it (the war, that is, not India). He is blackmailed by a British intelligence officer (Trevor Howard) into boarding a German freighter and stopping it being sabotaged by someone already aboard so that it, and its precious cargo, can be captured by the British. This constitutes the first half of the film, and is quite gripping. "Morituri" was made after Brando started getting "difficult", and apparently he hated this film. But to my eye he is as professional as one could hope for, and shows what a great actor he could be when he tried. He holds his own on screen against Trevor Howard, no mean feat in itself, and plays his part with utter sincerity, conviction and believability. While on board the ship he manages to defuse the bombs that are sprinkled about, all the while avoiding discovery by the would-be saboteur, and managing to conceal his true identity from everyone else. However, as time goes on his cover wears increasingly thin, and eventuallly he is revealed to be an impostor.
But - shock horror! - we are only halfway through the running time. The writers of the plot simply couldn't sustain the story any longer. So a second story is attached - a lifeboat, filled with a motley assortment of survivors from a ship sunk by the Japanese, is picked up by the freighter. One of the survivors is A WOMAN, and not just any old woman, but a European Jewess. Quite how she came to be there is never really explained. Suffice it to say that, once the survivors are aboard, the new mix of people on the freighter causes dissension and, eventually, chaos. All order breaks down and everyone ends up shooting at everyone else - the pro-nazi crew-members are hostile to the survivors, the survivors and non-nazi crew are hostile to the nazis, and some people are simply anti-everyone and hostile to everybody. Add to this the sizeable constituency of men from every faction that are intent on having their way with the woman, and you end up with a situation in which almost everyone but Brando is dead and the ship is left drifting derelict - and that's how the film ends. Very 1960's.
What a shame they couldn't sustain the original plot. Imagine what would have happened if the identity of the assassin in "The Day of the Jackal" had been established halfway through its running-time; what would they have done then? Dragged a woman into it? Have the French and British secret services falling out and shooting at each other? Got a Chinese agent to smuggle a nuclear bomb into the Sacre Couer (if only)? Oh well, at least the first half was good. Worth watching for that alone. And for seeing Brando at the height of his powers, before he became... Brando.

Despite being filmed in black and white, surprising in 1965, this starts off really well as German exile and recluse Brando, posing as a Swiss in British India, is blackmailed by Trevor Howard's dry English officer into saving a German ship from being scuttled en route from Japan to Europe (the British wish to capture its load of rubber as a prize). Meanwhile, a load of German political prisoners is pressed into service as part of the crew. The captain is pro-Fatherland but not a Nazi etc...so a bit of a cliche, but watchable.

Unfortunately, the plot loses its way as a German submarine, having torpedoed British ships, puts aboard the German one some Allied civilian survivors, including a (concealed) Jewish girl. This leads to an irrelevant and highly implausible outburst to Brando (posing as SS but in civilian clothing) that her parents had been put into gas chambers which, even if they existed, were, according to even the establishment historians, at that point in the war, highly secret; anyway...the girl then relates how the "Nazi's" made her have sex with her brother, after which no less than 17 of the Germans raped her...and somehow here she is in the Far East, en route to Australia! So that part of the film is highly implausible and, in fact, no more than the sort of rubbish unusual for a movie made well before the "Spielbergian" era, when every film about WW2 has to contain about 10% or so of "Holocaust" propaganda.

In the end, after mutiny, explosions and skulduggery, the vessel, disguised as Swedish, is damaged and the crew abandon ship, leaving only the Captain and Brando on its listing decks, with about 10 hours left before likely sinking. And there it ends! Overall, therefore, a sad failure which might have made a great, almost noir, film.