Morituri__Bernhard Wicki

So, I’m in bed this morning, a few days after watching an old VHS of Morituri, and can’t seem to get it out of my head. It’s a film from the mid-Sixties directed by a Bernhard Wicki, a German actor/director who’s probably best known for Die Brucke (1959). The evening I watched it in my apartment I wasn’t particularly impressed, except perhaps by the black and white cinematography of Conrad Hall, and the solid performances. So why this morning does it play over and over inside the broken down movie theater behind my eyes? And why, in this era of immediate forgetfulness can I still see the handsome profile of Marlon Brando in a white linen suit playing the coerced Nazi saboteur, smug in his personal isolation? I doubt that his performance in Morituri is to be found in anyone’s top ten Brando vehicles—so why this cinematic hangover on my part, where scenes sneak back into my consciousness unexpectedly, like an alcoholic’s memories of his most recent bender? This is not to say that the film was a bad one, but it didn’t seem like anything terribly original or poignant either. Nothing I would still be ruminating over days later.

Perhaps part of my acknowledged fascination was in the story, which at first glimpse seemed a rather ordinary World War II genre film mixed with equal parts Hitchcock-like thriller--that is, a rather formulaic espionage model. My opinion has changed though, but more on that later. In keeping with Hollywood’s menu for war movie success, Morituri does boast a very good cast including: Marlon Brando, Yul Brynner, Janet Margolin, Trevor Howard, Hans Christian Blech, Martin Benrath, and even the quintessential nerdy coward, Wally Cox. All are talented, all dedicated to their roles. One may quibble that Brando’s fey German accent seemed to come and go throughout the movie, or that Janet Margolin (the film’s only woman) falters at convincingly symbolizing the horrors of the holocaust, and indeed the history of all Jews—a chore too vast for any single character or actor. Though, even if her part was far too multi-faceted for a mere 15 minutes of screen time, she was the very soul of the movie, and the camera loved her face. It once again makes one realize what a loss American movies sustained when directors and casting directors began to overlook her abilities by the mid-1970’s, relegating her to episodic television until her early death. Then there’s Yul Brynner, an actor who I have previously pigeonholed as something of an industry hack. He’s one of those vaguely exotic actors who can fake ethnic roles, and he enjoyed a good career by playing the Cossack warrior, or Siamese King, or brooding Russian, or Egyptian Pharoah; his physical appearance and vocal bravado sometimes seemed more important than any insight into characters or their range of quiet emotion. But I was wrong. Recently watching him in The Sound and the Fury (Martin Ritt, 1959), I was captivated by his conflicted character’s interior confusion and secrecy, while outwardly delivering authoritarian bombast. Though paired with the formidable Joanne Woodward as a lead, Brynner paced himself into a cathartic unfolding by movie’s end. So too in Morituri, working with the heralded Brando, Yul Brynner interprets Captain Mueller (in a very strong performance) as yet another psychically antagonized personality, this time he's a captain of a freighter carrying an important cargo bound from Tokyo to Europe and, once there, the Nazi war effort. In addition to the aforementioned, the Darmstadt-born actor Hans Christian Blech was charismatically engaging as an anti-Nazi engine room worker named Donkeyman. This working class hero focused upon ending the reign of Third Reich power, represented in the form of Brando’s SS undercover officer, Robert Crain. Blech as Donkeyman is a very interesting actor, with facial scars actually carried back from WWII battles on the Russian front. Though he performed in a many roles in his homeland, he was rarely seen by American audiences. The entire cast proved well-chosen by Wicki, each one capable and seeming to feed off the performances of one another.



Perhaps here I should present a short distillation of the story: as mentioned Yul Brynner is Mueller, German captain of a freighter commissioned in Tokyo with bringing a load of raw rubber to aid the German war effort. He doesn’t seem to mind the cargo, but braces at the German navy hand-picking his crew with political prisoners they hope to arrest once the ship lands in German occupied territory. Meanwhile we find Brando's Robert Crain as a German deserter living the good life in India, hoping to live through the war undetected. His personal neutrality and anti-war stance is flipped by Trevor Howard, a British Intelligence Officer who threatens to arrest Brando and turn him over to the Gestapo if he doesn’t agree to sail upon the aforementioned freighter as a spy posing as a SS officer. Using his demolition skills, the plan is to dismantle the scuttling charges on-board ship, helping effect the waylaying of the precious cargo by American naval ships on the High Seas. The German freighter’s officer staff is composed of pro-Nazis whereas the crew is comprised mainly of political dissidents. About three reels into the film an American ship is sunk by a German U-Boat, and when their surviving passengers and crew are transferred as prisoners onto Yul Brynner’s ship for transport to Germany, the captain’s political disinterest is put to the test. One of the prisoners is a female German Jew named Ester, played adroitly by Janet Margolin. Ester had been previously imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo in Germany; and so now finds herself, once again, captured by her German nemesis and along with the other American prisoners is heading back aboard the ship to certain gestapo interrogation and a concentration camp. Her disdain is boundless and her sense of doom is palpable to all, rendering her fearless and capable of anything. Her plight convinces both Brando’s spy and Brenner’s ship captain to reassess their disenfranchised view of the war’s issues and combine forces to thwart the Nazis (typical Hollywood jingoism). Give or take a few subplots, that’s the main thread of Morituri’s story. Nothing we haven’t seen before, or will see again, but snappy and filled with digressive detours into moral questionings without rote answers, or any answers. In addition, the jaundiced view of mankind seen in political settings looks equally dismal for Axis or Allies; an uncommon focus, but probably a truer one from which to observe the grand experiment of war.

However, none of this gives any indication why the film remains interesting to me, or why it’s shallow political ideology should impress me. If the cast and cinematography are the most laudatory ingredients of Morituri, it would appear that the screenplay itself gives it its anemic palor. Certainly a lackluster story/screenplay can ruin a production, or at least hamstring the other factors into that status we may refer to as “a noble failure.” But I’m not so sure the screenplay is bad at all, just the contrary. It was written by Daniel Taradash as an adaptation from a novel by Werner Jorg Luddecke. Taradash’s professional track record as a screenwriter is very accomplished indeed. Some of his other efforts include Golden Boy (Mamoulian 1939), Knock On Any Door (Nicholas Ray, 1949), the weird and wonderful Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952), From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953) for which he won an Oscar, Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955), Castle Keep (Sydney Pollack, 1969), and many others. Of course a history of adapting novels into good movies doesn’t mean that he couldn't have bombed on Morituri, but it did make me look again before casting any aspersions onto Taradash for this film’s seeming weaknesses. No, upon rethinking it, the screenplay’s episodes, its pacing, its dialogue, its unity were all a solid bulwark upon which a good movie can be carried. And in addition, beneath the outward appearance of a fairly typical jingoistic war movie, lurks the film’s contrary philosophy—not an anti-war movie as once might expect from participants like Bernhard Wicki and Marlon Brando, but instead a thinking person’s war movie. And that is not common.



How to illustrate what I mean by a “thinking person’s war movie?” For lack of a better method, I’d like to introduce some of those scenes which keep coming back to me as I lie in bed. Here’s one: an introductory scene where Yul Brynner's captain Mueller exits a cab in a busy Tokyo street in 1942 and enters the German consulate. Nothing earth-shattering I suppose, a downtown street scene with a locale title naming the city and date. Brynner is obviously upset and hurried as he rushes from his cab into a nondescript, though modern, building to confront the German government. Oddly, out of all the Hollywood war movies I can think of, none showed a wartime Tokyo street scene, and certainly none showed Tokyo in 1942 with Westerners walking the streets, unhampered by irate citizens or military. Of course the Germans retained diplomatic ties with Japan during the war, and so it stands to reason that Japan may have had a few Germans in residence. But merely the image of a non-Asian in Tokyo seems to fly in the face of all that I, as an American, had seen in films or learned at school. Hollywood as an arm of American foreign policy nearly always showed Americans at war in a good light, and our enemies as diabolical monsters. Even in 1965, 20 years after the armistice, that fundamental view was still adhered to. We were also led to believe that Japanese citizens were racists, hating all Euro-centric peoples, especially white Americans—a useful guise to mask our own Asian racism. And so, merely to view an opening street shot of European civilians acting perfectly normal, and being treated quite decently in downtown Tokyo in the middle of WWII came as a shock. Of course Brynner's Captain Mueller works in and out of ports all over the world. Shipping is certainly an international occupation, even in wartime. Many countries refuse to take sides in a conflict, their independence being good for peace also good for commerce. And so it isn’t too large a leap to see that this world of international commerce (business), retains its primary focus on profit even in wartime, whether in combatant countries or neutrals. The one constant is business and its profitability. Of course this can be shipping, but also investments, financial trading, stockpiling natural resources and selling to the highest bidder regardless of political affiliation. Curious for me to begin watching a war movie, and I’m already thinking along these lines.

Not long afterward, we see another street scene, but this time the locale title informs us that we’re in India, 1942. Trevor Howard is paying a call on an effete playboy, Brando, in his Indian home surrounded by modern German art (Nazis considered it decadent), and tasteful, ancient Hindu sculptures. We find him dressed in fine western clothes and listening to Mozart on his record player. We learn that Brando's character is named Robert Crain, and had deserted the German army after being trained as a demolition expert. Though movies certainly have shown deserters many times, Brando is neither ruled by cowardice, nor anti-Nazi feelings, he’s merely interested in protecting his privilege at all costs. Before the war, he was never a jack-booted brown-shirt fighting communists in the streets, or rounding up Jews into trucks. Instead, we find in Brando an educated, art-loving, handsome, self-contained citizen of modernity and rational thought. His ideology knows no politics, nor great populations of like-minded volk. He’s an individual who has no allegiance to National Socialism nor Democratic Republicanism. He hates no one, but neither does he feel linked to anyone. Oddly, the Japanese writer Jun’ichiro Tanizaki wrote about similar people prior to WWII, most closely perhaps in Some Prefer Nettles, 1929. However Tanizaki’s central characters weren’t artistic Germans, but Japanese moderns who at that time included many western influences into their lives and ethos. Brando’s character is in exile from stupidity, from chaos, from injustice—he’s in flight from all those traits humans seem condemned to repeat. In most ways, he’s enviable in his thinking and his isolation, but there are larger issues at play in the world, and in this movie. Soon, he’s caught by the powers he seeks to avoid, in this case British Army Intelligence, then black-mailed into working for them against the German military, to which he once belonged.

Brando's Robert Crain is an eccentric, not unlike Camus’ Stranger, with the obvious and large difference that Brando can enjoy himself and doesn’t feel hounded by a sourceless anxiety. Brando’s character has set himself up to be a witness and a judge rather than a participant in war or communal life itself. But he’s dragged from that fortunate perch down into the mire of society, the masses who must dance to a fiddle played by those who control economic and political power. In today’s world, there are those who seem to follow Robert Crain's example. I think of Christopher Hitchens and those neo-cons who divorce themselves from the population at large, but seek to use abilities at their disposal to protect their solitary privilege, to amass distinction for themselves and friends, increase influence and wealth, and encourage the protection of a higher order. I think of those who would find wit more important than shelter for the homeless, personal art collections more important than simple protections for those millions of investors who find their retirement accounts ravaged by Wall Street oligarchs. I think of personal aggrandizement as redemptive theory. Now did Morituri bring me these ideas, or were they merely whirling around my brain and punctuated by the characters in Bernhard Wicki’s movie? Probably both.



As the film proceeds, there is a sequence when Janet Margolin’s character Ester relates the tortures and degradations she was forced to undergo at the hands of Gestapo agents. They were depraved, violent and in the case of her brother, lethal. In this film, Janet Margolin is a walking shade, a cipher roaming the world looking for her familial dead so that she can lie down with them forever. She had been damaged beyond repair, yet had the bad manners to still be alive as proof of a wicked world, a complex and dangerous species. We're in the maw of Greek tragedy here. Morituri doesn’t merely blame the Nazi’s, since we watch Americans (on board as prisoners) sexually raping her in exchange for their participation in a scheme to assault the ship’s officers. Her face shows no effect whatsoever, no pain, no remorse, no feeling at all. Those are luxuries which are no longer possible in a world where “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Janet Margolin wasn’t only a Jew representing all Jews; nor one Jew merely representing one integer in the Holocaust’s millions. Janet Margolin was representing all victims, past and future, Jews and non-Jews. And her pathetic story was the only cause sufficiently serious to change the beliefs of both Robert Crain's egalitarian self-love, and Captain Mueller's fusion with responsibility—be it for family (love for his son) or Fatherland. Americans depicted in this film weren’t heroic, Germans certainly weren’t either, nor Japanese, nor British. Each organized faction merely contributed to a larger immanence of brutality, no matter the flag. Refusal to enter conflict, or personal passivism wasn’t an option either, since power’s darkest debasements must be opposed in the face of its combined savagery. Or else . . . what? Perhaps something coded in our genetic make-up provides that answer, certainly something older than written history. Are we monsters and angels? Either or none?

At the denouement, humans in the unlikely costumes of Robert Crain and Captain Mueller finally remembered their humanity and acted accordingly, though not in time to save Ester's fragile life. Both become willing to accept even the possibility of the gestapo's draconian punishments for the treason of respecting their neighbor, perhaps loving their neighbor. The ending shots don’t exhibit the two main protagonists together in some composition of union or brotherhood. Instead they inhabit two separate parts of the floundering ship. Miracles of communion between erstwhile enemies isn’t the film’s easy answer. The questions posed are personal, solitary questions we are encouraged to ask themselves without aid of community or cant. Not bad for a 1965 war/spy movie . . . with Wally Cox.

.