Despite a Best Director award at a minor (Karlovy) Film Festival Louis Daquin failed to distinguish himself in French cinema or indeed any other and his penchant for adapting successful writers (he followed this from Jan de Hartog with Maupassant's Bel Ami) never paid off in big bucks for try as he might he could never line up all three cherries on the slot machine. Having said that he has a decent stab at adapting de Hartog's morality story and is well served by top-billed Pierre Brasseur and Louis Seigner and who knows what might have happened if another de Hartog effort, The Four-Poster, had not hit the screen around the same time. To nutshell the plot Brasseur is the skipper of a tramp steamer ferrying a cargo of Jewish refugees to Israel and, when they run into Visa problems in Alexandria, on to America. Yeah, I know, not the most pulse-quickening plot that ever came down the pike but what can I tell you. Interesting about covers it.
Review of Skipper Next to God
