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