Old Movies Return

Yes, more old movies. The Caine Mutiny, to be specific. Set in World War 2, it tells the story of a beat-up minesweeper of the Pacific Fleet receiving a new captain. A Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart). Queeg has served for a long time, and perhaps that's taken a toll. His demands for everyone to follow regulations with regards to haircuts, shaving, and keeping their shirts tucked in aren't unusual, but his tendency to perceive every misstep as some deliberate slight against him is. This becomes a problem when Queeg gets too involved in berating two of his officers because one of the deckhands has his shirt untucked (because he has a heat rash). He orders the pilot to maintain a hard right, and is so lost in his tirade, he fails to realize they are about to run over the tow line they're using to haul a target behind him, which results ins etting the target adrift. Queeg then compounds this by stating the report will be the cable was defective and broke on its own.

This produces dissension amongst the officers. Young Ensign Willis agrees with a senior officer Keefer (Fred MacMurray), that Queeg is unstable, and should be relieved of command. The exo, Maryk (Van Johnson) continually resists this, wanting to be loyal to his captain, but Keefer's claims that Queeg demonstrates all the signs of mental instability wear of Maryk. Eventually, when Queeg's orders seem lie to get the ship destroyed in a typhoon, Maryk invokes Article 184 and assumes command. Naturally, he's court-martialed for it.

Fortunately, his attorney, a Lt. Greenwald (Jose Ferrer), is able to clear him once he gets Queeg in to give his testimony. It's more impressive that he does so, with the naval tribunal there, making sure he doesn't in any way impugn Queeg's record. Talk about playing against a loaded deck. "You must prove the exo had reasonable cause to invoke Article 184, but don't you dare criticize the Captain's record!"

On the whole, it's a good film, but it suffers from the fact that apparently the studio didn't want to entirely make a naval captain out to be the bad guy (Since it was set in WW2, and released shortly after the war). So there's a scene where the officers are celebrating Maryk's not being hung. Greenwald shows up, and in addition to lowering the boom on Keefer, he hammers all the officers. He points out that at one point Queeg asked for their advice on how to make things run more smoothly, and they all disliked him so much, they said nothing. This is true. Greenwald claims that if they had helped Queeg, things would have gone better, and he wouldn't have had to destroy the man on the stand.

That is bullshit.

Queeg was a delusional paranoid, capable of fitting any occurence into his scenario of people being out to get him. He wasn't like that at all times, but when he felt criticized, he started pointing fingers. During his testimony, it was revealed one month before Maryk took command, Queeg gave him a glowing performance review. Now he's claiming Maryk was always unreliable?He might have truly wanted suggestions on how to make things better at the moment he asked, but it's entirely likely that he would construe any suggestions as disrespect. If any of the suggestions failed, he wouldn doubtlessly have blamed the officers for trying to make him look bad, for trying to undermine his authority.

Probably because it's Bogart, it puts me in mind of The Bogie Man, where no matter what happened, "Bogie" would figure out some way to fit it into his perception of the world as some strange amalgamation of all Bogart films. In a situation where that sort of person is your captain, I'm not sure what could be done about it.

So that part of the ending was a bit of a dud. Ferrer sells it well. He's a little tipsy, angry at himself for what he had to do for his client, angrier at them for what he feels they did to push things to this point. That doesn't change the fact he's completely wrong. There's also a romantic subplot in there about Ensign Willis, who struggles to patch things up with his girl, who feels she'll always be less important to him than his mother. Unless it's supposed to reveal Willis' susceptability to being controlled by manipulative authority figures (like Keefer), I don't see the point. It's not the most terribly shoehorned romantic subplot I've ever seen, Bullitt still holds the record for that, but it's pretty awkward.