Based on a novel by Werner Jorg Luedecke, a former German naval attache stationed in Tokyo, this WWII melodrama charts the journey of a German freighter from Tokyo to occupied France in 1942.
Robert Crain (Marlon Brando) is a German pacifist living in India during World War II Identified by British intelligence, Crain is blackmailed into performing a mission for the Allied cause, although he makes it clear that he cares only for his own life. He must impersonate an SS officer and go aboard a merchant ship bound for Europe from Japan, which contains a valuable shipment of rubber. His job is complicated by the fact that the British want him not to just destroy the vessel but prevent the scuttling of the ship so that its cargo can be captured. The captain of the S.S. Ingo is Rolf Mueller (Yul Brynner), who has his own troubles with the Nazis, and the ship itself is manned by a motley crew of career sailors and political prisoners pressed into duty by a lack of experienced seamen.
The voyage becomes a battle of wits between the Captain and Crain and is complicated by the arrival of some American refugees and a German Jew (Janet Margolin), the survivors of a sunken ship.
Bernhard Wicki, the German director of the acclaimed WWII drama, The Bridge (1959), was selected to helm the feature, working from a script by the Oscar®-winning screenwriter Daniel Taradash (From Here to Eternity (1953), Picnic (1955)).
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