An old director's film that shows how easy it is to decline into formalism as one's cinematic career declines. This movie celebrates its own style to the extent of reveling in the process of moviemaking rather than the art of storytelling.
Allegedly a comedy, this concerns passengers aboard a luxury ocean liner in the Mediterranean whose genteel, affected and superficial lifestyle is about to come up slap bang against the realities of the Great War. It picks up Serbian refugees and pretty soon an Austro-Hungarian battleship looms on the horizon to demand they be handed over.
The style is as theatrical and as melodramatic as the characterization - with classical opera arias to sweeten the pill. The first half's weak comedy is forgotten when the film gets serious in the second, just enough to save it from terminal lassitude.
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