The_caine_mutiny_(film)

The Caine Mutiny
original film poster
Directed by	Edward Dmytryk
Produced by	Stanley Kramer
Written by	Herman Wouk (novel) Stanley Roberts
Starring	Humphrey Bogart Don Dubbins José Ferrer Van Johnson Fred MacMurray Robert Francis Tom Tully E.G. Marshall Lee Marvin
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date(s)	June 24 1954 (U.S.)
Running time	124 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

This is about the film. For the 1951 novel see The Caine Mutiny

The Caine Mutiny is a 1954 film drama set during World War II, starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by Edward Dmytryk. It is based on the 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Herman Wouk The Caine Mutiny. The film depicts a mutiny aboard a fictitious World War II U.S. Navy destroyer minesweeper, the Caine and the subsequent court-martial.

Plot

Callow Ensign Willis Seward "Willie" Keith (Robert Francis, in his film debut) reportis for duty aboard the Caine, his first assignment out of officer candidate school. He is disappointed to find the Caine to be a small, battle-scarred, and indeed almost unseaworthy destroyer-minesweeper. Its lax commanding officer, Commander DeVriess (Tom Tully) has allowed the crew to become demoralized and undisciplined. Keith has already met the executive officer, Lieutenant Stephen Maryk (Van Johnson), and is introduced to the cynical communications officer (and aspiring novelist) Lt. Thomas Keefer (Fred MacMurray).

Keith does not make a good impression on his captain, but DeVriess is soon replaced by Lieutenant Commander Phillip Francis Queeg (Humphrey Bogart), a veteran no-nonsense officer. Queeg has seen years of continuous combat duty and is somewhat battle-fatigued. He quickly starts re-instilling discipline into the slovenly crew. He warns, "Mr. Maryk, you may tell the crew for me that there are four ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, the Navy way, and my way. If they do things my way, we\'ll get along."

The next day, the Caine is assigned to tow a target for gunnery practice. Afterwards, Queeg berates both Keith and Keefer over a crewman\'s appearance and while his attention is distracted, causes the Caine to cut the towline to the target. Other incidents serve to undermine Queeg\'s authority. When a quart of strawberries is stolen from the kitchen, the captain goes to absurd lengths to try to find the culprit. More seriously, in combat, Queeg breaks off escorting a group of landing craft long before they reach the hostile shore.

Keefer begins working on Maryk to relieve Queeg. Finally, during a violent typhoon, Queeg makes several potentially dangerous decisions — not to take on ballast during the storm for fear of fouling the fuel lines with salt water, and not to steer into the waves — that nearly capsize the Caine. When Queeg seems to be paralyzed and unable to deal with the crisis, Maryk takes over.

When they return to port, Maryk faces a court-martial for mutiny. He is assigned Lieutenant Barney Greenwald (Jose Ferrer) as defense counsel. The proceedings do not go well, as the self-serving Keefer has careful managed to cover himself and denies any complicity, though it was he who encouraged Maryk to question Queeg\'s sanity. However, Greenwald expertly cross-examines Queeg, getting him to snap and give blatantly paranoid testimony.

As a result, Maryk is acquitted, and he and his friends celebrate. A drunken Greenwald crashes the party and proceeds to lambaste Maryk, Keith and finally Keefer for not supporting their captain in his thankless task of putting a dishevelled and undisciplined crew back on its feet. He gets Maryk and Keith to admit that if they had supported Queeg, he might not have frozen during the typhoon and that therefore some of them were in fact guilty of mutiny. Greenwald concludes by throwing a glassful of wine into Keefer\'s face, denouncing him as the real "author" of the Caine mutiny, deliberately manipulated the others while keeping his own hands officially clean. After Greenwald leaves, the other officers walk out on Keefer, leaving him alone in the room.

A few days later, Keith reports to his new ship and is surprised to find himself once again under the command of DeVriess. However, his new commanding officer lets Keith know that he will start with a clean slate.

Awards and response

The movie provided Humphrey Bogart with the next-to-last great role of his acting career^{[citation needed]} and a comeback for Dmytryk, formerly one of the Hollywood Ten who first declined but subsequently agreed to speak of his past as a member of the American Communist Party.

The film received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor (Humphrey Bogart), Best Supporting Actor (Tom Tully as Captain DeVriess, the first captain of the Caine), Best Screenplay, Best Sound Recording, Best Film Editing, and Best Dramatic Score (Max Steiner). While Bogart had won a previous Academy Award (for The African Queen), in this case, he lost to Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. Dmytryk was also nominated for a Directors\' Guild Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures.

Bogart\'s Performance

Humphrey Bogart\'s performance as Lt. Commander Philip Queeg, which he gave while terminally ill with throat cancer, is considered by many to be the greatest performance of his career. Although not as popular as Bogart\'s earlier films, such as Casablanca or The Big Sleep, he is commended by critics for his "ticking time bomb" method of acting that inspired Jack Nicholson in The Shining. His final scene was so captivating that afterward the entire crew applauded him and he received an Oscar nomination, even though he ultimately lost the award itself.

Production

The Navy initially objected to the film\'s depiction of a mentally unbalanced man as the captain of one of its ships and the word "mutiny" in the film\'s title. But after the script was altered somewhat, the Navy cooperated with Columbia Pictures by providing ships, planes, combat boats, and access to Pearl Harbor and the port of San Francisco. Following the opening credits, the epigraph states that the film\'s story is non-factual. No ship named USS Caine ever existed, and no Navy captain has been relieved of command at sea under Articles 184-186: "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."

While a mutiny has never actually occurred, at least one is alleged to have been planned, the Somers Affair.

Director

Director Edward Dmytryk spent time in prison as one of the Hollywood Ten, writers and filmmakers sent to prison for refusing to answer questions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities about their ties to the Communist Party. After his release, Dmytryk spoke of his own Party past, which had consisted of a very brief membership in 1945, followed by pressure from other members to insinuate Communist propaganda into his work, and he identified 26 other Party members, in a second appearance before the House committee. He spent some time in England, and Stanley Kramer hired him to direct a few low-budget films before handing Dmytryk The Caine Mutiny. The film\'s success resurrected Dmytryk\'s career once and for all. He went from there to direct, among others, Raintree County, The Young Lions, with Marlon Brando as a Nazi officer, a remake of the Marlene Dietrich classic The Blue Angel, and the film version of Harold Robbins\'s The Carpetbaggers, among others. Dmytryk died in 1999.

Production information

• The Caine was played by the Navy destroyer minesweeper USS Thompson (DMS-38). This ship was not a 4-stack World War I-era ship, nicknamed a "four-piper," like the vessel in the novel because at the time the film was made, all such vessels had been scrapped.

• The ship was named for a fictitious Navy Commander, Arthur Wingate Caine, who died in battle while serving aboard another fictitious ship, the USS Jones. The Jones — portrayed briefly by the minesweeper USS Surfbird (AM-383) — is the ship that the Caine raced back to port during a minesweeping exercise early in the film. Admiral Halsey\'s unnamed flagship was portrayed by the USS Kearsarge (CV-33), a post-War aircraft carrier launched in 1946; a number of World War II-era fighter planes were placed atop the flight deck for filming purposes.

• The supporting character of Ens. Barney Hardin — whose strumming a ukelele singing a sarcastic song, "Yellowstain Blues," whose lyrics Herman Wouk himself had written (they were drawn from the novel) after Capt. Queeg inexplicably ordered a yellow dye marker thrown off the stern during the invasion incident — was played by Jerry Paris. Paris later became familiar as the wiseguy next-door-neighbor dentist Jerry Helper on The Dick Van Dyke Show — and as a successful television director whose credits included numerous episodes of The Odd Couple and Happy Days, both for producer Garry K. Marshall, one of his closest and longest-standing friends.

• According to MovieMistakes.com, no ship in the U.S. Navy during World War II was capable of traveling in a circle tight enough to cut its own tow-line, as the Caine was depicted doing. This may or may not be true based on the length of the tow-line.

• The novel goes into a great deal more detail about Willis Keith\'s experiences both in midshipman school and in his early relationship with his amorata May Wynn. After the court-martial, he returns to the Caine and we see his development into a tempered, capable Naval officer, which is barely hinted at in the film.

• The film\'s musical score was composed by Max Steiner, longtime staff composer at Warner Brothers, who occasionally wrote music for other studios. During the many years that Humphrey Bogart was under contract to Warners, a number of his films were scored by Steiner. This was the last Bogart film scored by Steiner; the stirring main theme was included in RCA Victor\'s collection of classic Bogart film scores, recorded by Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic Orchestra.

• The film is one of the few films to significantly feature Yosemite National Park and one of only two films to be filmed at the Ahwahnee Hotel.

Influence

• Maurice Micklewhite changed his name to Michael Scott when he first became an actor. He happened to be speaking to his agent in a telephone box in London\'s Leicester Square when he was told that he should change his name again because another actor was already using "Michael Scott." Looking around for inspiration, he noted that The Caine Mutiny was being shown at the Odeon Cinema, and so he decided to change his name to Michael Caine.

• After the novel\'s success, the court-martial sequence in the book was adapted into a full-length Broadway play, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, by its original author Herman Wouk. The play, directed by actor Charles Laughton, was a success on the stage in 1954, opening almost exactly five months before the release of the film The Caine Mutiny, which covers nearly the whole book, not just the court-martial scene. The stage version starred Lloyd Nolan as Queeg, John Hodiak as Maryk, and Henry Fonda as Greenwald. It has been revived twice on Broadway, and was presented on television in 1955, as a live presentation, and in 1988, as a made-for-television film.

• The British science-fiction sitcom Red Dwarf is about a huge spaceship which is run by an inept, even incompetent, computer called Holly. In one episode Holly is replaced by a back-up computer called Queeg. Whereas Holly is sloppy and easy-going, Queeg is ruthless, authoritarian and by-the-book, bringing misery to the lives of the crew, in ways similar to Bogart\'s character.

See also

• Trial movies
• Typhoon Cobra, an actual typhoon that threatened U.S. warships under circumstances similar to those in the book.

External links

• The Caine Mutiny at the Internet Movie Database

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia