Cruise Control.

"It could have been worse than it was....at least we're here.  At least we're alive."  So says one of the passengers on the latest ill-fated cruise, finally towed to shore late yesterday.  http://www.centurylink.net/news/read.php?ps=926&rip_id=<D9T7LTFG0@news.ap.org>

On the rocks, down the toilet (another recent cruise  was felled by a gastrointestinal parasite), left adrift--obviously, it's time for a cruise on the Ship of Fools, the 1965 film adaptation of Katherine Ann Porter's novel about passengers ill-starred and otherwise on a voyage to Europe just prior to World War II.  Filmed in black and white on a soundstage, the movie is not only stagey but quite speechy.  Yet it's also big and soapy in a good way, with a cast that includes Oscar Werner, Simone Seignoret, Lee Marvin and Vivien Leigh, who is as stately as the fictional ship that carries her in her last role.  Two years later she was dead at age 54.  Werner is matter-of-factly soulful (or is it soulfully matter-of-fact?) as a sick-at-heart ship's doctor.  He'd already played Jules in Truffaut's Jules and Jim, and in 1965 he also starred as the operative Fiedler in the excellent Spy Who Came in from the Cold; two years later he leaped ahead light years in Fahrenheit 451. 

In 1976, he joined another big sea-going ensemble in Voyage of the Damned, about the true story of the S.S. St. Louis and its 900 Jewish passengers trying to escape Nazi Germany.  The movie foundered on cheesy dialogue and bad reviews; if you want to judge for yourself, you'll have to rent it from Blockbuster because Netflix doesn't carry it.  The end portrayed by the movie--if not the fate of the movie--was slightly less dire in real life, or at least the fatalities were significantly lower than claimed by the film.

Cheery stuff, these cinematic cruises.  But they'll make you say, I'm here!  I'm alive!  And for a much lower ticket price.