A great movie in every way but the obvious. Jose Ferrer, playing the Jewish attorney who tries to save Van Johnson from death by hanging, makes an unexpected turnaround at the end of the movie during a lavish celebratory party scene (filmed at San Francisco’s legendary Palace Hotel). Ferrer’s drunken outburst is pure theater, but in terms of cinema syntax comes way out of left field. Gee, if he felt so badly about defending Maryk, why take the case at all? It seems like it was survivor’s guilt, that he wanted to make money so, knowing there was no big bucks to be made in the service, chose a career somewhere else, and left the schlubs like Queeg to do the real grunt work, and now we’re persecuting him for being lower class.

If that’s the case, then Bogart was exactly the wrong actor to play the part. He’s good, up to a point, but he’s stretching and it shows in every frame. Needless to say, there were a dozen stars in Hollywood who could have played Queeg much better than Bogart, and his “stunt casting” was just another Stanley Kramer ploy to get his picture talked about. “Playing against type” was what Stanley Kramer’s movies were all about: Monty Clift in JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG, Judy Garland in A CHILD IS WAITING, Spencer Tracy in MAD, MAD, WORLD, Sinatra in NOT AS A STRANGER, Gene Kelly in INHERIT THE WIND, Fred Astaire in ON THE BEACH, and so on and so forth. Watching Bogie rattle those two little steel balls in his palm while sweat explodes across his face–it’s special effects you’re seeing, not acting.

Fred MacMurray and Van Johnson, two underrated actors, put in good work here. Van Johnson has some really weird scars applied to his face that look like you could peel away his skin piece by piece like the Satanists in Michele Soavi’s LA SETTA. He looks like he’s leaking, a subtle touch by director Edward Dymtryk, who, after testifying in front of HUAAC in April 1951, and naming 26 of his friends as Communists, must have seemed just the guy to bring to the screen the story of one man’s betrayal and a government prosecution engineering to keep the status quo perky and fresh. He does a fine job except when the young officer, Willie (played by Robert Francis) has scenes on the phone or in person with his young love interest, May Winn (played by herself). They make the movie unutterably fake. Wonder why? Just the one scene of May Winn kneeling on her bed in a white stain negligee, on the phone to Willie, saying, “Darling, darling, darling”: why is one scene, one image enough to completely dispel all illusion? First person to tell me the correct answer gets a quart of strawberries with their ice cream down in the mess hall.

I’ve always liked this film, but it is not a great movie. I find it to be typical of its producer, Stanley Kramer. Kramer is, I think, the most over-rated name in film history. He made good films, that looked expensive and well put together, but, to me anyway, there was always something “not there”. I think what was missing was real imagination. As you watch his films, you just nod your head and think (maybe subconsciously) “that’s the way I expected it would be done”. There are always tons of cliches, visually, in the dialogue and in the plot. If I, as just an average film watcher, can sit through a whole movie and say “that’s just the way I woulda done it”, maybe it’s not that well done. We should expect higher levels of originality and imagination from an “auteur” with such a grand reputation.

The Caine Mutiny is a perfect example. It’s like a Cliff Notes edition of the book. There’s nothing really objectionable about it, but nothing exceptional either–except Humphrey Bogart.

Bogart gives a great performance–I think the best of his career–and he carries the whole film. The rest of the actors are OK, maybe with the exception of the “young lovers”, Willie and May–but I wouldn’t even put that entirely on the actors because their parts are so poorly written. The girl, May Winn, in particular, comes across as the silliest, whiniest character in the history of cinema not played by Jackie Searl. When I was younger, I was appalled by how bad the “romance” scenes were, and would always fast forward them. Now I get a laugh when I watch them, so I don’t skip. Besides–that’s the way they were in the book!

Jose Ferrer, as the defense attorney, got the chance to be very hammy; most of the rest of the cast was better than adequate, and we 3 Stooges fans even got to see favorite villain Kenneth MacDonald playing a serious part (with no spoken lines–I guess he was picked because he looked very military in uniform) as a member of the court martial. Even the famous Max Steiner contributed to the “atmosphere of cliche” with his musical score, which sounded like the musical score of every navy picture ever made.

But Bogart saves the picture. He has a lot of great lines in the picture (or he makes them sound great), my favorite being “we oughta have some fun around here now that there’s some detective work to be done”. I also love the scene when he is greatly offended when he is not invited to watch the Hopalong Cassidy film being enjoyed by the rest of the crew. Without Bogart, with another actor in his part, this film would have been a semi-bomb.

It’s an enjoyable and entertaining film, but it’s no classic and certainly not a great film. It could have been, maybe, with more imaginative hands running the show.