When a train bound for Switzerland is stopped short of the border, six refugees dodge Nazi bullets in a mad dash for sanctuary. Led by elderly Jew Ostrowskij (Curt Bois), who has lost his wife in the dangerous passage, the group takes shelter at a rural inn on the Swiss side. Given grudging shelter by innkeepers Anna and Franz Flückiger (Renate Steiger, Mathias Gnädinger), the refugees learn that asylum is more readily offered to deserters from the Third Reich than fleeing Jews (who are not considered political refugees) but that children under six years of age and their family members are permitted to stay. Seeking to be reunited with her husband, an internee of a Swiss work camp, Jewish housewife Judith Krueger (Tina Engel) hides her disgust to pose as the wife of Karl Schneider (Gerd David), an AWOL Aryan whose uniform is given to Judith's brother Olaf (Martin Walz), while Ostrowskij's granddaughter Gitte (Simone) and a French orphan (Maurice) are passed off as the Schneider children. The plan almost works, until the arrival of Judith's husband shatters the charade and condemns the refugees to deportation and certain death.
Born in 1941, Markus Imhoof had been a protégé of theatre and film director Leopold Lindtberg, a Viennese Jew who in 1934 emigrated to Switzerland, where he changed his surname from Lemberger. Lindtberg's film The Last Chance (1945) was a government-approved (and considerably more forgiving) account of Switzerland's relationship to asylum-seeking refugees. When Imhoof presented THE BOAT IS FULL to his former mentor, Lindtberg was initially hesitant about bestowing his blessing but eventually praised Imhoof for his courage. Reaction from the Swiss government was decidedly cool (one government official branded it "a poor folk play") but thanks to Imhoof's producer, George Reinhart, THE BOAT IS FULL received a wide international release, winning awards in Germany and Italy and earning its director seats at the New York Film Festival and the Academy Awards®. Swiss response to the film remained complicated (bomb threats were phoned in to cinemas and Imhoof's family home was defaced with swastikas), although its international renown had already begun to change the country's perceptions and memories of wartime events. By 1997, after the findings of the Bergier Report concluded that as many as 24,000 refugees were deported, Switzerland was able to look afresh at its complicity in the deaths of so many deportees.
Written in 1979, the resolutely grim THE BOAT IS FULL was actually patterned after droll identity mix-up farces popular at the turn of the 20th Century, particularly the British comedy Charley's Aunt. First performed in 1892 and since retold countless times for the stage and screen, the play was popular in Germany, where it was thrice adapted for the cinema and once for television. Curt Bois had acted famously in the play at Vienna's Josefstad Theater before the war. (After fleeing Nazi Germany, the actor turned up as a pickpocket in Casablanca, another film about refugees desperate for passage to freedom.) The admittedly contentious mixture of farcical tropes in the context of real life tragedy gives THE BOAT IS FULL unexpected potency and underscores the plight of Jews who forced to deny their identities in order to save them. Writing specifically for actors Bois, Engel and Mathias Gnädinger (later Hermann Göring in Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall), Imhoof fashioned his film not as a political polemic to besmirch redundant bureaucracies but as a tragedy that turns on recognizable human psychology. Here, the horror stems from the childish chauvinism of Swiss provincials who turn their backs on Jewish deportees rather than see them "fill the phonebook from 'vitch' to 'itzkis'."
Despite the esteem afforded THE BOAT IS FULL in the 25 years since its premiere, the film's negative was allowed to degrade in Rome until its 2001 cleanup by the combined efforts of Memoriav, an association dedicated to preserving the audiovisual heritage of Switzerland, and the digital restoration house Swiss Effects. Home Vision Entertainment's new Region-1 DVD of THE BOAT IS FULL includes in its roster of extras a featurette of still comparisons demonstrating how damaged frames, faded color and an unstable image were all corrected for this restored version. Even given the digital TLC, the image presented here evinces a high degree of grain but generally satisfying colors and contrasts throughout. The image is letterboxed at 1.78:1 and optional English subtitles complement the Dolby Digital 2.0 Swiss-German soundtrack. (It's a pity that most English-speaking viewers will not appreciate the film's culture clash between the "right German" speaking refugees and the Swiss, who speak a more rustic dialect.) The disc's extras also include a 17-minute interview with Markus Imhoof (who recalls engaging in military maneuvers dubbed "catch the refugees" while a soldier in the Swiss army in the 1960s), a 3-minute theatrical trailer, and a 29-slide still gallery of color and black-and-white production stills and behind-the-scenes candids. Home Vision Entertainment gets extra credit for backing their menu screens with the sound effect of rain sampled from the film's devastating final frames.
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by Richard Harland Smith
