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

The Maltese Falcon

Year of Release:  1941
Director:  John Huston
Screenplay:  John Huston, based on the novel The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Starring:  Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Peter Lorre, Barton McLane, Lee Patrick, Sydney Greenstreet
Running Time:  101 minutes
Genre:  Crime, drama, film noir

San Francisco, 1941:  Tough, wise-cracking, cynical private detective Sam Spade (Bogart) and his partner Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) are hired by the mysterious Ruth Wonderly (Astor) for what appears to be a routine case, but Archer is killed, and so is the man he is supposed to be investigating.  Under suspicion by the police for at least one of the murders, Sam digs deeper and finds himself embroiled with a group of wealthy and ruthless crooks on the trail of a priceless statuette known as The Maltese Falcon.

 Based on the 1929 novel by Dashiell Hammett, and marking the directorial debut of writer-director John Huston, this is one of the most influential films ever made, and one of the first and best of the "film noir" genre (stylish and bleak crime dramas largely made in the 1940s to 1950s).  It remains one of the great Hollywood thrillers, which still holds up today.  The plot is complex and intriguing, the script is full of memorable, quotable lines, and the cast is perfect. This was the film that really cemented Humphrey Bogart as a bona fide superstar, and there is also Mary Astor as the treacherous femme fatale,  Peter Lorre as a murderous thief and Sydney Greenstreet as the urbane criminal mastermind.

Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet investigate The Maltese Falcon

The African Queen

Year: 1951
Director: John Huston
Screenplay: James Agee and John Huston, based on the novel The African Queen by C. S. Forester
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn, Robert Morley, Peter Bull, Theodore Bikel
Running Time: 105 minutes
Genre: Action, adventure, drama, romance

Summary: German East Africa, September 1914: Rose Sayer (Hepburn) and her preacher brother, Samuel (Morley), are Methodist missionaries, living and working in a small village. Supplies, mail and news is regularly delivered by Captain Charles Allnut (Bogart) who sails a small run-down steam-boat called the African Queen. When the First World War breaks out, German soldiers raid the village, and Samuel is so traumatised by the experience that he dies shortly afterwards.
Realising that there is nothing left for her in the village, Rose decides to go away with Allnut in the African Queen. She discovers that the Germans have a large and powerful gunboat stationed in a large lake, which effectively blocks any British counter-attacks. Rose hits on the idea of using the supplies of explosives and canisters of oxygen to turn the African Queen into more or less a giant torpedo and use it to blow up the gunboat.
Allnut reluctantly agrees to go along with the plan. However, to get to the gunboat they have to travel down a long river which is so dangerous that it is considered to be completely unpassable, added to which they would have to pass right by a stronghold full of enemy soldiers.

Opinions: This movie is a fun mix of adventure, action and romance. It benefits enormously from the casting of Humphrey Bogart as the tough, gin swilling, rough-and-ready steamboat captain and Katherine Hepburn as the prim, proper and very strong-willed English missionary. The two have plenty of on-screen chemistry and the dialogue between them is witty and engaging. Both of them are almost constantly caked in dirt and sweat, looking very farm removed from glamorous Hollywood movie stars. The burgeoning relationship between the two characters is well-handled and the mix works well so that the romance element doesn't unbalance the action or vice versa.
The action sequences are well directed, and there are many vividly memorable sequences most notably a very unpleasant encounter with some leeches.
The film is strikingly photographed in Technicolor. A lot of the film was shot on location in Uganda and the Congo, which was very unusual for the time given the size of the cameras used for the Technicolor filming. Certainly it makes for a vivid and exotic backdrop for the action. The cast and crew had a tough time during the location filming, with most of the film-makers falling ill, except Bogart who later claimed that he didn't fall ill because he didn't drink any water on location, and instead used a large supply of whiskey that he had brought with him.
This film is basically a yarn. It doesn't try to be anything else than pure entertainment and it definitely succeeds at that.



Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart take a ride on board The African Queen