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The Caine Mutiny (film)

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The Caine Mutiny

original film poster
Directed by Edward Dmytryk
Produced by Stanley Kramer
Written by Herman Wouk (novel)
Stanley Roberts
Michael Blankfort
(add'l dialogue)
Starring Humphrey Bogart
José Ferrer
Van Johnson
Fred MacMurray
Music by Max Steiner
Cinematography Franz Planer, ASC
Editing by Henry Batista
William A. Lyon
Distributed by Columbia Pictures
Release date(s) June 24, 1954
Running time 124 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget $2,000,000 (est.)
Box office $8,700,000 (US)

The Caine Mutiny is a 1954 American drama film set during World War II, directed by Edward Dmytryk and produced by Stanley Kramer. It stars Humphrey Bogart, José Ferrer, Van Johnson and Fred MacMurray, and 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 USS Caine (DMS-18), and the subsequent court-martial of two officers.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Callow, rich Ensign Willis Seward "Willie" Keith (Robert Francis) reports for duty aboard the Caine, his first assignment out of officer candidate school. Homeported in Pearl Harbor, he is disappointed and horrified to find the Caine to be a small, battle-scarred destroyer-minesweeper. Its gruff captain, Lieutenant Commander William H. DeVriess (Tom Tully), has almost completely discarded spittle-and-polish discipline, and the crew of the Caine has become slovenly and superficially undisciplined – although their performance of their duties is, in fact, excellent. Keith has already met the executive officer, Lieutenant Stephen Maryk (Van Johnson), and is introduced to the cynical communications officer, novelist LT Thomas Keefer (Fred MacMurray), who refuses to equate the Caine with the rest of the Navy.

The captain is soon replaced by a 1936 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Lieutenant Commander Phillip Queeg (Humphrey Bogart), a no-nonsense veteran who has seen years of stressful duty in the Atlantic Fleet, LCDR Queeg having served on convoy duty in the North Atlantic against the German Navy. Queeg quickly attempts to re-instill discipline into the crew, warning: "[T]here 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." Keefer makes a slight remark comparing Queeg to Captain William Bligh, R.N. The next day, the Caine is assigned to tow a target for gunnery practice. Queeg berates both Keith and Keefer over a crewman's appearance and, while distracted, cuts off the helmsman's warning; as a result, the Caine continues in a circle and cuts the towline to the target. Queeg refuses to accept responsibility and tries to cover it up.

Other incidents serve to undermine Queeg's authority. A constant theme is that whenever Queeg becomes nervous, he rolls two steel ball bearings in his right hand. When the remains of a quart of strawberries is apparently missing from the officers' mess, the captain goes to absurd lengths to hunt the culprit. Despite being told the truth behind the 'missing' strawberries by one of his officers (the mess boys had eaten them), Queeg insists on believing otherwise. Queeg relates a story to Maryk and Keefer from 1937 when, as an Ensign on a cruiser, a similar incident had occurred when cheese has been stolen from the galley. It was found that a seaman had a crafted a duplicate key to the ship's pantry. Queeg found the guilty party and was commended for his actions.

Other instances of Queeg's erratic behavior include an instance where, in combat, Queeg breaks off from escorting a group of landing craft during an amphibious assault long before they reach the fiercely defended shore, instead dropping a yellow dye marker in the water and leaving the landing craft undefended, leading the crew to derisively sing "The Yellowstain Blues". Afterwards, Queeg makes a speech to his officers, not explicitly apologizing for his behavior, but bending enough to ask for their support. His disgruntled subordinates do not respond.

Keefer begins trying to convince Maryk that he should relieve Queeg on the basis of mental illness under Article 184. Maryk begins keeping a journal, documenting Queeg's behavior while reading up on mental illnesses. When the opportunity offers itself, Keefer convinces Maryk and Keith to accompany him to the admiral's flagship, to present their case against Queeg to Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr.. While aboard Halsey's ship, the three observe a well-executed drill, and it occurs to Keefer that all of Queeg's documented actions could be interpreted as reasonable attempts to instill discipline on a seemingly sloppy ship, leaving them open to a charge of conspiring to form a mutiny. When Halsey's aide tells the Caine officers that Halsey will see them, Keefer decides to talk Maryk and Keith out of what could become a disastrous course of action.

Matters come to a head during a violent typhoon. Maryk urgently recommends that they steer into the waves and take on ballast, but Queeg steadfastly refuses to alter the ship's course from the fleet-ordered heading and declines Maryk's request for ballast, as he fears that the ballast will foul the fuel lines with salt water. Queeg's decisions seem to Maryk to threaten capsizing of the Caine. When Queeg appears to become paralyzed and unable to deal with the crisis, Maryk relieves him and takes over, with Keith's support.

José Ferrer played the attorney who reluctantly defended the mutineers, LT Barney Greenwald.

When they return to port, Maryk and Keith face a court-martial for mutiny. After questioning them and Keefer, Lieutenant Barney Greenwald (José Ferrer) reluctantly accepts the job of Maryk's defense counsel, which a number of other lawyers have already turned down. Greenwald is a decorated Naval Aviator, having been wounded in combat, and his right arm is bandaged. The proceedings do not go well, as the self-serving Keefer has carefully managed to cover himself and denies any complicity. It was he who encouraged Maryk to question Queeg's sanity, playing amateur psychiatrist, and Greenwald has warned him in private that, under Article 186 of Naval Regulations, Keefer could, on these grounds, be held as responsible as Maryk.

A Navy psychiatrist, Dr. Dixon (Whit Bissell), testifies that Queeg does not have a mental illness, which the prosecution feels is enough to justify a conviction. But when Queeg is called to testify he snaps under Greenwald's tough cross-examination and gives blatantly paranoid testimony. Maryk is acquitted, and Keith is spared any charges.

After the acquittal, Maryk and the other Caine officers celebrate at a hotel. Keefer joins them, not having the guts not to attend, although he lied in his testimony to protect himself. He thanks Maryk for not revealing this to the other officers. Maryk dismissively tells him that it is "over and done with," but at that moment a drunken Greenwald shows up, and, claiming a "guilty conscience," proceeds to reveal what really happened. Greenwald berates the officers of the Caine for not appreciating the years of danger and hardship endured by Queeg, a career naval man. He then lambastes Maryk, Keith, and finally Keefer, for not supporting their captain when he most needed it and gets Maryk and Keith to admit that if they had given Queeg the support he had asked for he might not have frozen during the typhoon.

Greenwald then turns to the man who, in his opinion, should really have been on trial: Keefer. He denounces him as the real "author" of the Caine mutiny, who "hated the Navy" and manipulated the others while keeping his own hands officially clean. Maryk tells Greenwald to "forget it" but instead the lawyer exposes Keefer's double-cross in court, throws a glassful of champagne into his face and issues a contemptuous challenge: "If you wanna do anything about it, I'll be outside! I'm a lot drunker than you are, so it'll be a fair fight!" The other officers also depart, leaving Keefer alone in the room.

A few days later, Keith reports to his new ship, a destroyer, and is surprised to find himself once again serving under now-Commander DeVriess as his captain. However, his new commanding officer lets the now Lieutenant, junior grade Keith know that he will start with a clean slate.

[edit] Cast


Cast notes

  • The Caine Mutiny was only the second film of Robert Francis, who was being groomed for stardom – but on 31 July 1955, he was killed when the private plane he was piloting crashed shortly after take off from Burbank airport.[1]

[edit] Production

When the U.S. Navy hesitated about endorsing a possible film and aiding the production, studios shied away from purchasing the film rights to Herman Wouk's novel.[2] As a result, producer Stanley Kramer purchased the rights himself for an estimated $60,000 – $70,000. After an unusually long pre-production period of fifteen months, due to the Navy's indecision, The Caine Mutiny went into production from 3 June to 24 August 1953, under the initial working title of Authority and Rebellion.[3]

Location shooting took place in front of Royce Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles in the opening scene, at Naval Station Treasure Island in San Francisco, Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, and at Yosemite National Park in California, the scene of the Yosemite Firefall and Keith's romantic interlude with May Wynn while on leave.[4]

The film premiered in New York City on 24 June 1954, and went into general release on July 28.[5] It cost an estimated $2 million to make and grossed $8.7 million in the United States.[6]

[edit] Casting

Richard Widmark was originally intended to play Queeg, but producer Stanley Kramer opted for Humphrey Bogart instead. It took a while to get Bogart, however, even though he very much wanted to play the part, because Columbia was not willing to pay Bogart his usual top salary. Bogart commented about this to his wife, Lauren Bacall: "This never happens to Cooper or Grant or Gable, but always to me."[7] During shooting, Bogart was already suffering from the earliest symptoms of the throat cancer that would eventually kill him. Bogart, a Navy veteran, had served as an enlisted man in the US Navy in World War I.

Lee Marvin was cast as one of the sailors not only for his acting ability, but also because of his knowledge of ships at sea. Marvin had served in the U.S. Marines from the beginning of American involvement in World War II through the Battle of Saipan, in which he was wounded. As a result, Marvin became an unofficial technical adviser for the film.[7]

This was the second of three films that José Ferrer appeared in for producer Stanley Kramer; the other two were Cyrano de Bergerac, and Ship of Fools, which is the only one of the three films that Kramer directed. Though his character of Barney Greenwald was supposed to be Jewish (a fact made relevant in the book but not in the film), Ferrer himself was not.

[edit] Script

Despite the fact Wouk had already worked the material from the novel into a stage play, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which premiered on Broadway in January 1954 and ran for a year,[8] Herman Wouk's attempt at writing the screenplay was considered "a disaster" by director Edward Dmytryk, and he was replaced by Stanley Roberts, who later quit when told to cut the film down to two hours. Those cuts, fifty pages worth, were done by Michael Blankfort, who received an "additional dialog" credit.[7]

Wouk's novel goes into much greater detail about Ensign Keith's experiences in midshipman school and in his early relationship with his girlfriend May Wynn. After the court-martial, he returns to the Caine and develops into a mature, competent Naval officer, something that is only hinted at in the film.

Also, in the novel, Captain Queeg is roughly thirty years old at the time of the mutiny. Bogart, however, was fifty-five at the time of filming. The character of Captain Queeg, as a 1936 USNA graduate, would have typically been born around 1914. Bogart and men born in 1899 would have normally been in the USNA Class of 1921.

In the original novel and stage play, Greenwald is mentioned as being a Jew who appreciates more than anyone else the importance of keeping the Nazis as far away from America as possible, thus putting more emphasis on his sympathy for Queeg and contempt for the junior officers who have only signed on for the duration.

[edit] Commissioning Plaque

Maryk and Keefer remain in the Ward Room after Queeg has addressed the officers after the "yellow stain" incident. Maryk looks at the Commissioning Plaque on the Ward Room wall.

USS CAINE DMS 18
THIS SHIP IS NAMED FOR
ARTHUR WINGATE CAINE
COMMANDER US NAVY
WHO DIED OF WOUNDS RECEIVED
IN RUNNING GUN BATTLE
BETWEEN SUBMARINE AND
VESSEL HE COMMANDED
USS JONES
THE SUBMARINE WAS SUNK
IN THE ENGAGEMENT

The camera remains on the plaque for the viewer to read it with Maryk.

[edit] Navy involvement

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. 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 has 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." However, while no mutiny has ever actually occurred in the U.S. Navy, at least one, the Somers Affair, is alleged to have been planned.

The Caine was represented by the Navy destroyer minesweeper USS Doyle (DMS-34) and the 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 Jones, the ship the Caine raced back to port early in the film, was represented by the minesweeper USS Surfbird (AM-383). The hull number on the Caine is 18. USS Hamilton (DD–141) was a Wickes class destroyer in the United States Navy following World War I, later reclassified DMS-18 for service in World War II. The Hamilton was scrapped in 1946. Admiral Halsey's unnamed flagship was represented by the USS Kearsarge (CV-33), a post-war aircraft carrier launched in 1946 (in actuality, and in the novel, Halsey flew his flag on the battleship USS New Jersey); a number of World War II–era fighter planes were placed atop the flight deck for the filming. USS Jacob Jones (DD-61) the USS Jones of the Caine's commissioning plaque, had a similar fate in World War I. The Jacob Jones commanding officer, David Worth Bagley survived the sinking of his ship. The ship that Willis Keith conns out of port at the end of the film was the USS Richard B. Anderson (DD-786).

[edit] Director

Before handing him The Caine Mutiny, Stanley Kramer hired Dmytryk to direct a few low-budget films. The film's success resurrected Dmytryk's career. For refusing to answer questions about his ties to the American Communist Party to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he spent time in prison. After his release, Dmytryk spoke of his Party past, which consisted of a very brief membership in 1945, followed by pressure by other party members to put Communist propaganda into his films. In a second appearance before the House committee, he identified twenty six Party members.

He went on to direct Raintree County with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor; The Young Lions with Clift, Marlon Brando and Dean Martin; a remake of the Marlene Dietrich classic The Blue Angel, and the film version of Harold Robbins's The Carpetbaggers, among others.

Dmytryk felt The Caine Mutiny could have been better than it was. He thought the movie should have been three and a half to four hours long to fully flesh out the characters and tell the story completely, but Columbia's Harry Cohn insisted on a two-hour limit.[7]

[edit] Music

This was the last of a number of Bogart films scored by composer Max Steiner, mostly for Warner Bros. 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 lyrics of the derisive song "Yellowstain Blues," which mocked Queeg's perceived cowardice during the landing incident, were written by Herman Wouk. They were drawn from The Caine Mutiny, the novel on which the film was based.

[edit] Soundtrack

The original soundtrack album for The Caine Mutiny was never actually officially released, and hence it is one of the rarest in existence; perhaps a dozen copies survive. RCA Records 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 felt that including this scene was an infringement on his recently opened Broadway play dealing with the court-martial, and 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.'"[9]

[edit] Reception

Film critic Tim Dirks has called Bogart's turn as Lieutenant Commander Philip Queeg his last great film performance.

This film was a box office success and the second highest grossing film of 1954, earning $8,700,000. The #1 box office hit of that year was White Christmas, which earned $12,000,000.[10]

[edit] Awards and honors

The film received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor (Humphrey Bogart, losing to Marlon Brando for On the Waterfront), Best Supporting Actor (Tom Tully), Best Screenplay, Best Sound Recording (John P. Livadary), Best Film Editing, and Best Dramatic Score (Max Steiner).[11]

Dmytryk was also nominated for a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures.

American Film Institute Lists

[edit] Influence

  • When Briton Maurice Micklewhite first became an actor, he adopted the stage name "Michael Scott." He was later told 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, Micklewhite looked around for inspiration, noted that The Caine Mutiny was being shown at the Odeon Cinema, and thus changed his name to "Michael Caine", which he has retained since. He has joked in interviews that had he looked the other way, he would have ended up as "Michael One Hundred and One Dalmatians."[17]
  • 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 apparently 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.
  • In "The Doomsday Machine" episode of the original Star Trek series, William Windom's character of Commodore Matthew Decker, though the installment is a re-working of Moby Dick, or--The Whale with Decker as a re-envisioning of Ahab, conducts himself similarly to Phillip Queeg, and he even rubs together a pair of square tape cassettes in one hand during duress as Queeg would roll steel balls under pressure.
  • In the "Captain Crocodile" episode of The Monkees television series, near the end of the episode, Captain Crocodile, believing that he is ready to be fired, begins rolling two steel balls just as Phillip Queeg did. In addition, in the episode "Hitting The High Seas", Micky asks, "What did they do to Captain Queeg?" To this, Peter replies, "Steal his strawberries."

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ IMDB Biography of Robert Francis (I)
  2. ^ TCM Notes
  3. ^ TCM Overview
  4. ^ IMDB Filming locations
  5. ^ IMDB Release dates
  6. ^ IMDB Business data
  7. ^ a b c d Scott McGee "The Caine Mutiny" (TCM article)
  8. ^ IBDB "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial"
  9. ^ "General Music Collecting FAQs". http://members.tripod.com/~Vinylville/faq-3.html. Retrieved 2008-12-21. 
  10. ^ Steinberg, Cobbett (1980). Film Facts. New York: Facts on File, Inc.. p. 22. ISBN 0-87196-313-2. 
  11. ^ "The 27th Academy Awards (1955) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/legacy/ceremony/27th-winners.html. Retrieved 2011-08-20. 
  12. ^ AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies Nominees
  13. ^ AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains Nominees
  14. ^ AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes Nominees
  15. ^ AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) Ballot
  16. ^ AFI's 10 Top 10 Ballot
  17. ^ "Michael Caine (I)". The Guardian (London). 1998-11-06. http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,445597,00.html. Retrieved 2010-05-25. 
  18. ^ Posted by rockknj on 03/23/09 at 6:35PM. "Terminator, "Today is the Day, Part 2": Never trust a captain named Queeg". NJ.com. http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/03/terminator_today_is_the_day_pa.html. Retrieved 2009-05-02. 

[edit] External links

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