The Caine Mutiny (1954 film)

The Caine Mutiny is a 1954 American military trial film directed by Edward Dmytryk, produced by Stanley Kramer, and starring Humphrey Bogart, José Ferrer, Van Johnson, Robert Francis, and Fred MacMurray. It is based on Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 novel of the same name. Set in the Pacific theatre of World War II, the film depicts the events on board a U.S. Navy destroyer-minesweeper and the subsequent court-martial of its executive officer for mutiny.

The film was released by Columbia Pictures on June 24, 1954. It was well-received by critics and was the second highest-grossing film in the United States in 1954. At the 27th Academy Awards, the film was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor for Humphrey Bogart. Edward Dmytryk was nominated for a Directors Guild of America Award.

Plot

During World War II, newly commissioned Ensign Willis Seward "Willie" Keith reports to the minesweeper USS Caine, where he meets career officer Lieutenant Stephen Maryk, the ship’s executive officer, and aspiring novelist and communications officer Lieutenant Thomas Keefer. Soon after, Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg is assigned command of the Caine. The eccentric Queeg imposes strict discipline on the lax crew, making him unpopular with them, but initially admired by Keith.

During a gunnery target towing exercise, Queeg is distracted berating Keith and Keefer over a crewman’s appearance, resulting in the ship steering over and cutting the towline, setting the target adrift. Queeg tries to cover up the incident.

thumb|left|275px|The "strawberry investigation".

Assigned to escort a group of landing craft during an invasion of a small Pacific island, Queeg abandons his mission before he reaches the designated departure point, and instead orders the dropping of a yellow dye marker, leaving the crew of the landing craft to fend for themselves. Queeg asks his officers for their support, but they remain silent and nickname him "Old Yellowstain", implying cowardice.

Believing Queeg to be paranoid, Keefer encourages Maryk to consider relieving Queeg on the basis of mental incapacity under Article 184 of Navy Regulations. Though Maryk angrily rejects that possibility, he does begin keeping a medical log documenting the captain's behavior.

Attempting to justify a strict need for discipline onboard, where even small infractions matter to maintain order, Queeg relates to his officers an account on a previous assignment where he received a commendation for an investigation to stop pilfering that involved stolen supplies of cheese. When a quart of strawberries go missing from the officers' mess, Queeg convenes an elaborate investigation to determine the culprit. Even though the mess stewards confess to having helped themselves to the missing portions, Queeg orders the berths searched and crew members strip searched. Convinced of Queeg's instability, trying to relive past “glory”, Keefer again urges Maryk to expose Queeg’s unfitness for duty. Maryk asks Keefer and Keith to go with him to report to Admiral Halsey about the matter. Arriving aboard Halsey's flagship, Keefer backs down, warning of the danger of accusing a captain, and they return to the ship.

At the height of a typhoon, Maryk urges the captain to reverse course into the wind and take on ballast, but Queeg refuses and virtually freezes up on the bridge. Supported by Keith, Maryk relieves Queeg of command under Article 184. The Caine returns to San Francisco, where Maryk and Keith face a court-martial for mutiny. Lieutenant Barney Greenwald, a temporarily grounded naval aviator and an attorney before entering the Navy, becomes Maryk's defense counsel.

At the court-martial, Keefer testifies that he never observed any mental illness in Queeg and was "flabbergasted" when Queeg was relieved. Later, when Queeg takes the stand, he exhibits odd behavior under Greenwald's relentless cross-examination, including his habit of rolling two steel balls in his hand manifesting his mental instability. Maryk is acquitted.

Following the acquittal, the officers of the Caine hold a party, where Keefer receives a frosty reception from Maryk. A drunken Greenwald arrives, remorseful about having had to expose Queeg to defend the wrongly accused Maryk instead of the man who should have been held accountable. He berates all the officers for not taking into account Queeg's long service and for failing to give Queeg the support he asked for, instead of deriding him as an incompetent. Greenwald claims their mistreatment of Queeg, who had been suffering from "battle fatigue" from his previous combat service in the Atlantic, caused the captain to become indecisive during the typhoon. He denounces Keefer as the real "author" of the mutiny, exposing to all present how Keefer disclaimed in his testimony his repeated unqualified "diagnosis" of Queeg's mental illness. Greenwald throws a glass of champagne, the "yellow wine", in Keefer's face. The rest of the officers walk out, leaving Keefer alone in the room.

Later married to his girlfriend, May Wynn, Keith is promoted to Lieutenant (junior grade), and assigned to a new Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer commanded by now-Commander De Vriess, his first captain on the Caine.

Cast

thumb|275px|The act of mutiny: Maryk's relief of Queeg during the typhoon.|alt=

Pre-production

Writing

Herman Wouk had already adapted his novel as a stage play, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which premiered on Broadway in January 1954 and ran for more than a year. The play was directed by Charles Laughton and was a critical as well as a commercial success. Wouk was initially selected to write the screenplay, but director Dmytryk was dissatisfied with his draft. He replaced the novelist with Stanley Roberts, an experienced screenwriter. Roberts later quit the production after being told to cut the screenplay so the film could be kept to two hours. The 50 pages worth of cuts were made by Michael Blankfort, who received an "additional dialog" credit.

The film differs from the novel, which focused on the Keith character, who became secondary in the film. The film instead focuses on Queeg. Studios did not want to purchase the film rights to Wouk's novel until cooperation of the U.S. Navy was settled. Kramer purchased the rights himself for an estimated $60,000 – $70,000. The Navy's reluctance to cooperate led to an unusually long pre-production period.

Casting and director

Stanley Kramer and Columbia Pictures intended to cast Humphrey Bogart as Philip Queeg. Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn knew that Bogart wanted the part and took advantage of that fact, and he was eventually able to force Bogart to settle for much less than his usual $200,000 salary. "This never happens to Cooper or Grant or Gable, but always to me", Bogart complained to his wife, Lauren Bacall.

Production

Filming

Principal photography took place between June 3 and August 24, 1953 under the initial working title of Authority and Rebellion.

In addition to the Pearl Harbor and San Francisco Bay Area locations, including the Caine steaming back and forth several times under the Golden Gate Bridge, the romantic subplot features scenes shot on location at Yosemite National Park.

The , a destroyer minesweeper, was one of the ships chosen to represent the USS Caine in the film. The Rodman had two less smokestacks than the actual s on which Wouk served, and had more anti-aircraft guns. Completed in 1941, she was a much more modern ship than the 1918-manufactured Clemson-class destroyer minesweepers had been. True to the theme of the novel, the actual minesweepers of Wouk's service, the and the , were both outdated ships by the time the film was made. The Zane was retired shortly after the war, and the Southard was scuttled in October 1945 after running aground in Okinawa with Wouk serving as Executive Officer. One of the primary inspirations for the book and the movie came from Wouk's experience as second in command of the Southard when she ran aground in Okinawa as a result of Typhoon Ida in September 1945. The Essex-class aircraft carrier was used in depicting the abortive visit to Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. aboard his unnamed flagship.

Columbia claimed the film contained the longest continuous courtroom scene without a cut, running to 977 feet, surpassing a scene in The Life of Emile Zola.

Navy involvement

The Navy was initially uncomfortable with both the portrayal of a mentally unbalanced man as the captain of one of its ships and the word "mutiny" in the film's title. After Stanley Roberts' shooting script was completed and approved by the Navy after 15 months of negotiations, the Department agreed to cooperate with Columbia Pictures by providing access to its ships, planes, combat boats, Pearl Harbor, the port of San Francisco, and Naval Station Treasure Island for filming. Dmytryk recalled in his memoir that after "noisy" protests from the Navy subsided, the film production received wholehearted cooperation.

An epigraph appears on screen immediately following the opening credits that reads: "There has never been a mutiny in a ship of the United States Navy. The truths of this film lie not in its incidents, but in the way a few men meet the crisis of their lives."

Music

This was the last of a number of Bogart films scored by composer Max Steiner, mostly for Warner Bros. The main title theme, The Caine Mutiny March, was included in RCA Victor's collection of classic Bogart film scores, recorded by Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic Orchestra.

The lyrics of the song, "Yellowstain Blues", which mocked Queeg's perceived cowardice during the landing incident, were drawn from the source novel.

Soundtrack

The original soundtrack album for The Caine Mutiny was not officially released until 2017, and copies of the soundtrack made before that are very rare. Perhaps a dozen copies survive. RCA Victor planned an LP release with musical excerpts on the first side and the complete dialogue of the climactic court-martial scene on side two, but Herman Wouk believed that including this scene was an infringement on his recently opened Broadway play dealing with the court-martial. He threatened to prohibit Columbia Pictures from making any further adaptations of his work. According to Wouk, "Columbia head Harry Cohn looked into the matter, called me back, and said in his tough gravelly voice, 'I've got you beat on the legalities, but I've listened to the record and it's no goddamn good, so I'm yanking it.'" Max Steiner's score was finally released by Intrada Records in 2017 as Special Collection Volume ISC 382.

Reception

The film premiered in New York City on June 24, 1954, and went into general release on July 28. Made on a budget of $2 million, it was the second-highest-grossing film of 1954, earning $8.7 million in theatrical rentals in the United States. It was the most successful of Kramer's productions, some of which had previously lost money, and put his entire production company – as well as Columbia Pictures – in the black.

The film got a major pre-release boost three weeks before its premiere when Bogart as Queeg appeared on the cover of the June 7, 1954 issue of Time magazine. The accompanying cover story ("Cinema: The Survivor") praised Bogart's portrayal of Queeg as "a blustering, secretive figure in Navy suntans, who brings the hollow, driven, tyrannical character of Captain Queeg to full and invidious life, yet seldom fails to maintain a bond of sympathy with his audience. He deliberately gives Queeg the mannerisms and appearance of an officer of sternness and decision, and then gradually discloses him as a man who is bottling up a scream, a man who never meets another's eyes. In the courtroom scene, Bogart's Queeg seems oblivious of his own mounting hysteria. Then, suddenly, he knows he is undone; he stops and stares stricken at the court, during second after ticking second of dramatic and damning silence."

Film critic Pauline Kael mentions that the film was a fiasco because the material disintegrated in the photography, direction and acting.

Director Edward Dmytryk felt The Caine Mutiny could have been better than it was and should have been three and a half to four hours long to fully portray all the characters and complex story, but Columbia's Cohn insisted on a two-hour limit.

The February 2020 issue of New York Magazine lists The Caine Mutiny as among "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars."

Awards and nominations

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"

! Award

! Category

! Nominee(s)

! Result

! Ref.

| rowspan="7"| Academy Awards

| Best Motion Picture

| Stanley Kramer

| align="center" rowspan="7"|

| Best Actor

| Humphrey Bogart

| Best Supporting Actor

| Tom Tully

| Best Screenplay

| Stanley Roberts

| Best Film Editing

| William Lyon and Henry Batista

| Best Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture

| Max Steiner

| Best Sound Recording

| John P. Livadary

| rowspan="2"| British Academy Film Awards

| colspan="2"| Best Film from any Source

| align="center" rowspan="2"|

| Best Foreign Actor

| José Ferrer

| Directors Guild of America Awards

| Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures

| rowspan="2"| Edward Dmytryk

| align="center"|

| rowspan="2"| New York Film Critics Circle Awards

| Best Director

| align="center" rowspan="2"|

| Best Actor

| Humphrey Bogart

| Venice International Film Festival

| Golden Lion

| Edward Dmytryk

| align="center"|

American Film Institute Lists

AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – Nominated
AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains:
Lt. Commander Philip Francis Queeg – Nominated Villain
AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
"Ah, but the strawberries! That's--that's where I had them." – Nominated
AFI's 10 Top 10 – Nominated Courtroom Drama

Legacy

In his book American Literature on Stage and Film, historian Thomas S. Hischak says that Dmytryk handled both the action sequences and character portrayals deftly, and calls Queeg's breakdown during the trial "the stuff of movie legend."

Cultural influence

When Michael Caine, born Maurice Micklewhite, first became an actor he adopted the stage name "Michael White". He was later told by his agent that another actor was already using the same name, and that he had to come up with a new one immediately. Speaking to his agent from a telephone box in Leicester Square in London, he looked around for inspiration. Being a fan of Bogart, he noted that The Caine Mutiny was being shown at the Odeon Cinema, and adopted a new name from the movie title. Caine has often joked in interviews that, had he looked the other way, he would have ended up as "Michael One Hundred and One Dalmatians".

Vince Gilligan used a clip of the film in a Breaking Bad episode titled "Madrigal", originally transmitted in 2012, and has stated that The Caine Mutiny was one of his favorite movies as a child. The final scene of "Chicanery", an episode of the Breaking Bad spinoff series Better Call Saul, is an homage to the film's climactic courtroom scene.

In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, members of the human resistance serve aboard the submarine USS Jimmy Carter piloted by a reprogrammed Terminator that has been named "Queeg" by the crew.

In the Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine", the obsessive Commodore Matt Decker, portrayed by William Windom, fusses constantly with two futuristic tape cartridges, much as Captain Queeg rubs together two bearing balls. Windom publicly acknowledged that Decker's behavior was based on Queeg's.

Notes

References

External links

Bogart newspaper column on The Caine Mutiny