“Whoever enters here, his name and soul are gone.” So reads the warning on the deck of the Yorikke, the ship at the center of Georg Tressler’s Das Totenschiff (US: Ship of the Dead), a criminal high seas adventure that belongs to a subcategory we might call nautical noir, along with The Ghost Ship (1943), The Breaking Point (1950), and PT Raiders (1955), among others. Perhaps tellingly named for the exhumed skull in Hamlet, the Yorikke transports a small crew of desolate souls who were Shanghaied by a malevolent captain (Alf Marholm), who, we later learn, is secretly smuggling guns and ammo down below and plans to kill the crew at journey’s end to keep them from squealing. One man on board is Philip Gale (Horst Buchholz), penniless and homeless after a prostitute (Marielouise Nagel) steals his wallet and identity papers; joining the crew as a matter of chance and desperation, Gale is forced to work as a furnace stoker covered with sweat, filth, and ash all day long (an open-minded viewer might see parallels to the German work camps from just two decades earlier), resentments morphing into shovel fights with his fellow crewmen. When the crew’s granted a brief shore leave, Gale, along with his new friend, the devoted, lovable Lawski (Mario Adorf), go off to secure fake papers, but the dealer’s price is for the guys to kill his enemy down the street. As the Yorikke’s journey comes to a violent end, Gale finds comfort in recollections of his one night with the beautiful girl (Elke Sommer) whom he found sitting alone by a railroad track in the countryside a few months earlier (this encounter dominates the first act of the film). Kovac’s score makes elegant use of a few key refrains, like the trumpets blaring at the peaks of tension or the romantic violin melody during downtime.