The Caine Mutiny (1954)
Directed by Edward Dmytryk
Columbia Pictures, Technicolor, 122
minutes, Not rated.
★★★★
Add this one to
your bucket list of Hollywood classics you should see. It is the morally
ambiguous tale of a U.S. Navy minesweeper crew’s rebellion against its
commander–a sort of World War Two era Mutiny
of the Bounty, if you will. The Caine
uprising is fictional, though, and is based on a 1951 Herman Wouk novel of the
same name. The Caine Mutiny was
critically praised and was nominated for numerous Oscars. In most years it
would have been a big winner, but it came out the same year as On the Waterfront and settled for a few
lesser awards.
A modern viewer
needs to know a few things to best appreciate this film. First, the psychology
of the day was a bit different. Freudianism was all the rage, though most
people’s understanding of it was a bit like that of Caine communications officer Thomas Keefer (Fred MacMurray, who
later starred in TV’s My Three Sons).
In other words, it was much discussed, but little understood–sometimes even by
psychologists themselves. There are a few now-embarrassing sequences of
mother-fixation/girlfriend conflict that only make sense within the pop culture
reading of Freud en vogue in the early 1950s. PTSD fell into the same category,
an unfortunate consequence of which was that battle fatigue and mental illness
were often misdiagnosed as cowardice.
To introduce
still another matter, director Edward Dmytryk was one of the original Hollywood
Ten indicted in 1947. He was accused of being a communist at a time in which
the Second Red Scare had broken out and early Cold War paranoia and swept
across the land. Dmytryk served time in jail for Contempt of Congress for
refusing to testify. In 1951, however, he changed course, fingered several alleged
communists, and resurrected his directorial career. Dmytryk’s life and times
make it hard to escape the parallel levels of suspicion in the film script and
those raised by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose reign of error reached its apex
at the same time as The Caine Mutiny
was being filmed.
The film is a
character study and drama. Ensign Willie Keith (Robert Francis), a child of
privilege, has just be assigned to the U.S.S.
Caine, a motley rust bucket with a lax crew under the command of William
DeVriess (Tom Tully). The timeframe isn’t pinned down, but we can tell it’s the
waning days of the War in the Pacific. Willie is shocked by the lack of proper military
discipline and initially welcomes the change in command that brings Lt. Commander
Phillip Francis Queeg (Humphrey Bogart) to the helm to crack the whip on sloppy
sailors such as “Meatball” (Lee Marvin) and “Horrible” (Claude Atkins). Queeg’s
behavior, however, becomes increasingly erratic and Keefer begins to plant the
seed–based on having read Freud in college–that maybe those ball bearings he
twirls in his hand when he’s nervous are his missing marbles, if you catch my
drift. He also goads Lt. Steve Maryk (Van Johnson), an ill-educated but fine
officer, to consider he might have to take over if Captain Queeg cracks.
The ball
bearings, an incident with a towed target, an investigation into missing
strawberries, an escort duty, and a raging typhoon factor into the story, and
are famed scenes within the film. When Queeg is finally removed from command,
the film cuts to the court-martial trial of Maryk, Keith, and Keefer to
determine whether they are heroes or if they illegally mutinied. Ironically,
the prosecutor is E. G. Marshall, who three years later would co-star in
another famed courtroom saga: 12 Angry
Men. But The Caine Mutiny trial’s
star is José Ferrer as Lt. Barney Greenwald, who defends the Caine crew–though not as you might
imagine.
Bogart was
nominated for Best Actor, but looking at the film now, we see it’s actually
MacMurray’s film more than Bogart’s–even though Bogie left us with an enduring
portrait of a man who cracked under too much pressure. The Caine Mutiny certainly shows its age in its stereotypical
sequences, mannered acting, and telescoped narrative arc, but it remains one of
the American Film Institute’s Top 100 films because it is such a timepiece, not
to mention that it was something of a template for a what-you-see-isn’t-necessarily-what-you-get
movie. In The Caine Mutiny, lots of
questions are open for interpretation: cowardice, loyalty, and even insanity.
Plus, it’s filmed in Technicolor and I’ve yet to see digital color that can
match it.
Rob Weir
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