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Waste of time

Sadly Over-hyped

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

A war pacifist (Marlon Brando) is blackmailed to pose as an SS officer and to disable the scuttling explosives on freighter carrying rubber cargo to be captured by the Allies.The film did not do well on its original release, probably at least in part because few people understood its title. The movie is also one of unrelieved gloom, which may have been a factor. The film was a financial disaster. In an attempt to be more commercial, the film was reissued as "Saboteur: Code Name Morituri". Even knowing what the word means and seeing the film, I still find it strange.Marlon Brando is pretty great here. I don't know if he is generally recognized as a great actor. I suppose he is, but you don't often hear him listed among the greats. But if I didn't know who he was, I would have believed he was, in fact, a German actor. The accent is really good. (Germans may disagree, but to these American ears it was spot on.)

I saw this for the first time in 48 years on Netflix last night. The only visuals I remembered were 1-Janet Margolin with a bullet hole in her forehead 2-the Nazi assistant captain with a bloody forehead from banging on the ships side 3-the innovative(for 1965) helicopter wide shots.I had totally forgotten about the plot and any character development. Brando was coming off of some scathing reviews in "Mutiny on the Bounty" and "Ugly American" and was about to go southern in "The Chase" so definitely a low time for him. Yul was Yul and Wally "Mr. Peepers" Cox was playing lost again like he did in "The Bedford Incident". If this were made 5 years later Janet Margolin would probably have shown more skin and fared better than a few Woody Allen movies. Oh yes, Trevor Howard makes a cameo appearance as Trevor Howard. The Netflix print looked like it had been stored in the trunk of a 1963 Volkswagen at the neighborhood junk yard. Too bad because th B+W kind of gave it a Noirish tone. I don't know if it was B+W to save money or to create a mood or just to say it was Brando and Brynners last B+W movie.

When Marlon Brando was asked why he was in a movie such as "Morituri", he replied that he had three households to support and was paying alimony to two women. His answer made perfect sense even if the movie doesn't.Marlon Brando plays Robert Crain, an anti-Nazi German living in India during World War Two. He is coerced by British intelligence into stopping a ship, the Ingo, with its load of rubber from reaching the Nazis. Posing as an official named Kyle, he is to disarm explosive charges that have been planted around the ship, and arrange for it to rendezvous with US warships mid-ocean.As Kyle sets out, the Nazis order Captain Rolf Mueller, played by Yul Brynner, to sail the Ingo to France. Although Meuller is a fine seaman, he has a drinking problem and unresolved issues with just about everything. He is also anything but a committed Nazi, and is dangerously outspoken about Hitler. Kyle is fortunate in his choice of vessel because the Ingo is the ship of the 'Good Germans'. Meuller's crew is by-and-large anti-Hitler, and die-hard Nazis are definitely in the minority. Other than First-Officer Kruse, it would be hard to get a decent Heil Hitler out of the rest of the crew even on the Fuhrer's birthday. Kyle goes about disarming the explosives and despite a few close calls all goes well until a Japanese submarine delivers a German admiral and a cargo of prisoners. Among the prisoners is a Jewish woman, Esther Levy, played by Janet Margolin, an actress who deserved a better role than this. Her character in "Morituri" is over-wrought and over-written.After Kyle explains his mission to her she agrees to help him. The Nazis have left her with such a low-level of self-esteem that she attempts to convince the mainly American prisoners to take over the ship by offering them her body. The script of "Morituri" is rich with heavy-handed touches such as this; the events that befall Esther's character expose a certain degree of misogyny on the part of the filmmakers.During movies of the 60's, there was a trend to paint the Germans in a more favourable light after two decades of portraying them as one-dimensional heavies. However, "Morituri" goes so far in the other direction that it is the American prisoners who are painted as the villains. Meuller takes to the bottle and performs an over-the-top drunk scene before collapsing at Brando's feet. Brando, on the other hand, plays Kyle with such considered understatement that he too comes close to overacting. We have seen Brando's German before as well as his sailor – his Kyle not only incorporates a great deal of Christian Diestl from "The Young Lions" but also has a touch of the foppishness of Fletcher Christian from "Mutiny on the Bounty".The film limps to a close as Meuller and Kyle join forces to save the ship for the Allied cause. Although "Morituri" has authentic-looking scenes at sea, these don't save the story from becoming becalmed. This is because the principals are so well intentioned and honourable that the whole thing comes across as one-note, and not a particularly convincing note at that.

Morituri (1965)I had no expectation here. The name was odd. And the description was odd--a WWII film from the point of view of the enemy. Sort of. And so I didn't really think I'd be fully captive.And I was. This is a special film war film. For one thing it has Marlon Brando being his arrogant best, and Yul Brynner, too. It presents an odd dramatic situation, a tension between strong willed characters who don't quite know what the other is up to. Here I mean Brando playing a German plant on this ship going from Japan to Europe, and Brynner, the captain, a disgruntled German with some experience both with the wheel and the bottle. The ship is a modern (1942) Japanese ship, and among the crew are a bunch of political prisoners, who of course can't be totally trusted. The cargo is rubber, the most sought after material in the early war (later it would be uranium, I suppose).Cinematographer Connie Hall is quite aggressive and brilliant with his photography, keeping the angles and movement nearly constant. The light is dramatic, the sharpness clean. And he got nominated for an Oscar for his work. The interior of the ship is large and filled with strange turns, great heights, lots of interior and exterior spaces that take you by surprise. Beautiful stuff.The plot moves more quickly than you'd expect, too, with little surprises and turns, like finding a burning American ship at night and rescuing survivors. One of these is a young woman who was born in Berlin and they question her--why is a German on an enemy ship? And she says she is not German. And they ask what is she? You expect here that she might say she was American, but even better she says, "I am anti-German."The script is tight and believable. The scenario, which is not formed from fact as far as I could discover (it's based on a novel), seems reasonable. And it ends up being more subtle than you'd expect. Yes, there are aspects that are obvious dramatic additions--the one woman who appears, for example, happens to be Jewish--but these end up being ways of showing people's characters. Ultimately that's what this movie is about.