Ship of the Dead

Philip Gale, an American sailor, loses his papers and turns into a man no country will admit. He ends up signing on to a tramp steamer called the Yorikke, talked into it by Lawski, a Polish stoker. The Yorikke is a floating coffin: work in the boiler room that is close to slavery, a crew scraped together from every nation, officers who make no secret of what they think of them. Georg Tressler's 1959 film comes from B. Traven's 1926 novel. Traven is a writer whose identity is still not settled; what he is writing about is how a man without a passport becomes nobody at all. Horst Buchholz and Mario Adorf are both young here, and it is one of Elke Sommer's first jobs.