"A Unsussessful Crinimal"

Sail a Crooked Ship (Columbia). A very funny man was the late Ernie Kovacs (TIME, Jan. 19), and never funnier than when he was playing a shtunk. Big, broad-shouldered and vulgarly handsome, he had a way of swaggering up to some pitiful little twerp and sneering down at him as he sucked reflectively on a cigar the size of a fungo bat and stroked a big, black, bushy mustache that seemed to demand insultingly: "Howzat for virility, ya hairless squirt?"

In Ship, the last movie he made. Comedian Kovacs plays Bugsy F. Foglemayer, a might-have-been menace who has plenty of big ideas but unfortunately keeps them in an itsy-bitsy brain. "I'm a unsussessful crinimal," Bugsy sighs, "because I had a unhappy childhood. My parents didn't understand me. I spoke English, they spoke Hungarian." To win success and "get my name on the front page of every history book," Bugsy resolves to commit "the greatest crime of the censury"--a $3,000,000 bank robbery in Boston.

Assisted by a menagerie of muggs who are even dumber than he is. Bugsy heists a Liberty ship from the mothball fleet in the Hudson River and sails it to Boston--that tiny brain figures as how the Liberty ship will come in handy for the getaway, but it forgets to figure as how nobody in the gang can operate the overgrown pea pod.

Such petty considerations do not dismay the crew or trouble the captain's mind. When the vessel somehow gets under way, Captain Foglemayer--the customer can tell he's the captain because he wears a gold-braided hat and keeps rolling two ball bearings around in his hand--calmly goes below with his broad, a slinky brunette named Virgie (Carolyn Jones), not forgetting to give the crew their instructions: "Fatten the hatches!"

When he finds himself on a collision course with a ferryboat. Captain Foglemayer sticks his head out of the window and hollers: "Get outa da way, ya punk!'' When he loses his broad overboard, he squalls: "Make a U-turn!" When he gets caught in a passing hurricane, he lashes himself to the wheel--which proceeds to spin like a top.

In short, before that tub is halfway to the Hub. the spectator understands that what he is giggling at is a shaggy story--nothing so apocalyptically sneaky, of course, as John Huston's deathless Beat the Devil, but a piece of fine hairy humor all the same. Deftly adapted by Ruth Brooks Flippen and Bruce Geller from a novel by Nat Benchley, Ship is tautly run by Director Irving Brecher, and it carries a competent crew of supporting players: Robert Wagner, Dolores Hart, Frankie Avalon, Frank Gorshin. Naturally, the captain is always in charge. One minute he cheerily pours whisky on his Wheaties. The next, when the mink he gives the broad turns out to be hoked-up hamster, he screeches in outrage: "I'll sue the guy I stole it from!" And again, eying with some concern a low-back frock his honey has ladled herself into, he inquires thoughtfully: "Say, Virgie. Ain't you got that dress on backwards?"

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