Review of And The Ship Sails On

Introduction

Fellini`s 1983 dose of Italian weirdness is set in the summer of 1914 when a fat lady has sung her last. Ghost of Motley Hall Freddie Jones stars in this peculiar movie alongside a startling number of British character actors including Jonathan Cecil and Peter Cellier.

A luxury liner sailing with a full compliment of exotic characters leaves Italy with the ashes of opera singer Tetua. Three days into the voyage, the Captain is forced to rescue Serbian refugees fleeing the initial rumblings of the Great War.

The movie opens with a piece of cod silent movie, shot in monochrome with added neg scratches and jump frames. The movie is a frequently impish evocation of the last days of the old Europe, before it was shattered by the ravages of the First World War. Much of the movie is taken up with Freddie Jones`s observations about the rich mix of eccentric characters populating the ship. The mood changes somewhat as the Serbian refugees are brought aboard to occupy steerage and ultimately the ship sinks in a diplomatic incident with an Austro-Hungarian warship.

At the climax of the movie, Fellini suddenly fourth-walls the audience by pulling over the pitching rail of the stricken liner and on to the film crew working around the huge hydraulic platform the deck set is mounted on. It only goes to reinforce the air of unreality that permeates the movie. The sets are very stagey, the miniatures of the vessels at sea are unconvincing in the extreme. What we are watching is an artifice, not a reconstruction of events.

Video

The movie is presented in non anamorphic 1.85:1. The print is of acceptable quality for a movie made in 1983, but is unrestored.

Audio

It`s weird watching so many familiar British actors whose voices you know so well, dubbed into Italian while you have to read English subtitles. The audio is in plain vanilla Dolby Digital 2.0 mono.

Features

The movie disc has no extras, other than the option to turn on or off the English language subtitles. The extras disc comes with three documentaries - two editions of La Felliniana "A Star Is Born" and "The Work Of A Genius", and "Federico Fellini: Self Portrait". These are fullscreen 4:3 and like the main feature come with original Italian soundtracks and English language subtitles. The self portrait includes behind the scenes footage from La Dolce Vita and Fellini`s other movies, mostly in black-and-white.

Conclusion

A strange but charming movie full of Federico Fellini`s stock-in trade of weird characters in weirder surroundings. As an evocation of the dying days of Old Europe, it works quite well. While it lacks some of the visual excesses of some of Fellini`s movies it is sufficiently off-kilter enough to be an accessible introduction to the works of the maestro.