Battleship Potemkin

 Year:  1925

Director:  Sergei Eisenstein

Screenplay:  Nina Agadzhanova, Sergei Eisenstein, Nikolai Aseyev, Sergei Tretyakov

Starring:  Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barksy, Grigori Aleksandrov

Running Time:  70 minutes

Genre:  Drama

In 1905, the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin endure a miserable existence in cramped conditions, with harsh punishments and bad food.  A consignment of rotten meat eventually proves the breaking point and the crew mutiny, successfully taking over the battleship.  The mutiny proves the inspiration for the people of the port of Odessa to turn against the tsar, but the tsarist soldiers retaliate with extreme ferocity.

Intended as Soviet propaganda, Battleship Potemkin has been hailed as one of the greatest films ever made, and is certainly one of the most influential.  The justifiably famous "Odessa Steps" sequence in which soldiers march mechanically down the steps gunning down fleeing civilians, has been initiated and referenced in countless films, including The Untouchables (1987), Star Wars: Episode III - revenge of the Sith (2005) and Dune (2021).  Aside from its purpose as propaganda, director Sergei Eisenstein used the film to test his theories of "montage".  Montage theory is that the juxtaposition of certain sequences of film  can either create an emotional response in viewers or convey information in a quick and effective way: for example training sequences in sports or action films where montage is used to compress time to show how the training is progressing in a quick and effective way.  Eisenstein intended the way that Battleship Potemkin was edited to fire up his audience's revolutionary zeal.  In fact, Eisenstein was disappointed that the film was not a huge success in its native Soviet Union, but the film was highly praised internationally.  It has been controversial for its politics and, for the time, graphic violence.  The film is simplistic in it's plot, with the characters quite crudely drawn, as may be expected for a propaganda film, the audience is left in no doubt who they are supposed to root for, but in terms of style it is still effective, even almost 100 years later.  There are unforgettable images such as the looming guns of the battleship, the baby carriage rolling down the steps, the face of a woman shot in the eye, the red flag being hoisted (a vivid splash of colour in an otherwise black and white film), and three separate stone lions shown in quick succession as if a slumbering lion statue is awakening.  Even if you disagree with the film's politics, it is an important work and a required viewing for film fans.  

   Battleship Potemkin

 

The Caine Mutiny

 Year:  1954

Director:  Edward Dmytryk

Screenplay:  Stanley Roberts and Michael Blankfort, based on the novel The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

Starring:  Humphrey Bogart, José Ferrer, Van Johnson, Fred MacMurray, Robert Francis, May Wynn

Running Time:   125 minutes

Genre:  War, drama, 

During World War II, the USS Caine, a dilapidated minesweeper, manned by a tired, disillusioned crew, comes under the command of veteran Captain Queeg (Bogart).  Queeg, a strict martinet, immediately starts whipping the crew into shape and instilling strict discipline.  Some of the officers on the Caine suspect that Queeg is paranoid, and, as he becomes increasingly unbalanced, decide to seize control of the vessel.  Soon they find themselves facing a court-martial.

This is based on the 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Herman Wouk.  Humphrey Bogart gives a strong performance as the jittery, paranoid Queeg, who is forever rubbing together a pair of metal spheres.  He conveys Queeg's incipient madness subtly, with a slight tensing of his face, and shifting of his posture, as well as adopting a slightly staccato speech pattern.  Another strong performance comes from José Ferrer, who only appears in the second half of the film, as the Navy lawyer who defends the mutineers at the court martial, despite his own moral conflict over the case.  Considering the fact that the film was made in 1954 it is interesting that it focuses as much as it does on mental health and psychology.  Queeg, for all his paranoia and instability, is never an entirely unsympathetic character.  There is a lot of discussion in the film about Freudian psychology in regards to Queeg's paranoia, although the good Doctor might have something to say about the romantic subplot where the newly graduated Ensign Keith (Francis) has to choose between his nightclub singer girlfriend (May Wynn) and his domineering mother (Katherine Warren).  It is in the romantic subplot that the film is at its weakest, because it feels completely extraneous to the rest of the movie.  Lee Marvin and E. G. Marshall appear in small roles in the film.  Lee Marvin had himself served in the US Marines during World War II and was wounded in action during the Battle of Saipan, and was thus an unofficial technical adviser for the film.

The film moves from a Naval adventure film, including a sequence where the Caine has to escort some small landing craft during the invasion of a Pacific island, where Queeg cracks up, causing the ship to abandon it's mission before it's completed, and a sequence where the ship is almost destroyed during a fierce typhoon.  However the undoubted highlight is the climatic trial scene.

The Caine Mutiny