The crew of the USS Caine knows that they have a responsibility to remove a superior officer if that officer isn’t fit for duty. The question they must answer is whether the erratic behavior of Lieutenant Commander Queeg (Humphrey Bogart) necessitates such drastic action. They watch Queeg lie about running over a towline, abandon an escort mission mid-battle, and start a witch hunt to find missing strawberries.1 Concerns about Queeg’s judgment come to a head during a ship-threatening typhoon, and here Lt. Maryk (Van Johnson) crosses the Rubicon and relieves Queeg of his post.
The court-martial trial that follows is great, mostly because this is when José Ferrer shows up as moralistic defense attorney Barney Greenwald. Greenwald cracks Queeg on the stand, showing the court the captain’s mental illness and getting an acquittal for Maryk. Later, Greenwald drunkenly delivers the film’s closing argument: that despite the legal victory of the mutineers, it was their previous lack of support for their captain that led to a situation where a mutiny was necessary—meaning they were, in a way, guilty all along.2
Rating: 7/10, documenting the breakdown of military discipline and presaging the end of American hegemony.
Cast and Crew
We last saw Bogie sailing with Katharine Hepburn in 1951’s The African Queen, but his portrayal of the Caine’s captain is a lot less likeable than Charlie Allnut. It’s impressive to watch Bogart, a guy known for tough, competent characters who save the day and get the girl, play Queeg, a craven, petty tyrant.
We won’t be seeing Bogie again in this column, as he died in 1957 without any of his last six movies getting Best Actor nods. These films include Sabrina (1954), which we touched on when discussing William Holden; The Barefoot Contessa (1954), which provided chef Ina Garten with her nickname; The Desperate Hours (1955), where escaped convicts break into a house and hold a family hostage; and The Harder They Fall (1956), a boxing movie that was Bogart’s last. I feel like we did Bogie dirty by only catching two of his movies, but alas, there’s just so many movies out there for us to watch.3
After his roles in Cyrano de Bergerac and Moulin Rouge, José Ferrer is back playing another brilliant, self-righteous character, though this time without any physical deformity.4 Surprisingly, he didn’t get a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work here—and worse, one went to Tom Tully for his milquetoast role as the Caine’s previous captain. Other than the snub, Ferrer and his wife Rosemary Clooney cleaned up in 1954, as The Caine Mutiny and Clooney’s White Christmas were among the highest grossing movies of the year.
Fred MacMurray co-starred as the cowardly Lt. Tom Keefer, whose conduct contributes to the atmosphere of insubordination and disloyalty among the crew. Wanna see him covered in wine?
We saw MacMurray in a small role in Sunset Boulevard, and before that he starred in the 1944 noir Double Indemnity. Post Caine, he pivoted to more family-friendly fare: two live-action Disney works, The Shaggy Dog (1959) and The Absent-Minded Professor5 (1961), plus the squeaky-clean sitcom “My Three Sons” (1960-1972).
Herman Wouk won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1952 novel “The Caine Mutiny,” but he’s more than that. For one, he’s been referred to as “an American Tolstoy,” which, damn. You should know his sprawling two-part WWII saga “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance”; my mother, an avid trivia player who has no interest in military history, doesn’t ever miss questions about WWII just because she read these two books years ago.6
The Trivia
Let’s talk about Navy ranks!
For enlisted men, the ranks are Seaman and Petty Officer7
Between enlisted men and officers are the ranks of Warrant Officers
The officer ranks include Ensign, Lieutenant Junior Grade, Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander, Commander, Captain, and five kinds of Admiral
The highest rank is Fleet Admiral, which is only assigned during wartime and of whom there have only been four (William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and William Halsey).8
Note that “Midshipmen” are the Naval cadets in training to be officers, though in some countries that is the lowest officer rank. Also note that we don’t have “Commodores” any more; that rank now roughly translates to the one-star flag rank of Rear Admiral (Lower Half).
Speaking of Admiral Halsey, he’s the admiral the mutineers decide to see about Queeg’s incompetence (though they wuss out at the last minute). Halsey’s biggest career moments are during WWII: he was part of the fighting in the Pacific, including at the Battle of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and the Battle of Leyte Gulf off the coast of the Philippines (note that the latter battle is considered the largest naval conflict in history). The Japanese surrender was signed on his flagship, the U.S.S Missouri. Halsey also served in the Great White Fleet, the battleships Teddy Roosevelt sent around the world to project American naval power.9
Also, hey! Paul and Linda McCartney hit #1 on the Billboard charts with their track “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey.” I’m not a big McCartney guy10 but this track is pretty good. Its DNA also clearly trickled down into some cool modern bands, like Unknown Mortal Orchestra and The Lemon Twigs.
Let’s quickly cover the HMS Bounty, the other big trivia mutiny to know.11 In 1787, Lieutenant William Bligh left England to collect breadfruit from Tahiti. On the way back, just off the coast of Tonga, Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian seized the ship from Bligh on account of Bligh’s harsh treatment of the crew. Bligh and the other non-mutineers were set adrift and had to travel 4,000 miles in an open boat to the Dutch colony on Timor in present-day Indonesia. Meanwhile, the mutineers sailed the Bounty back to Tahiti where some of the mutineers stayed.12 Others, including Christian, settled on the previously-uninhabited Pitcairn Island, where their descendants still live.
Odds and Ends
The previous Caine captain ironically tells Keith that “war is Hell”; that phrase is attributed to General Sherman…while at Yosemite, Keith sees the Yosemite firefall, where hot embers were poured over Glacier Point, falling 3,000 feet to the valley below; the Firefall was stopped in 1968…Michael Caine, born Maurice Micklewhite, got his stage name from this movie…Van Johnson played Maryk; he’s best known as the “boy next door” who, with June Allyson (the “girl next door”), made up the “sweetheart team” (we mercifully won’t be watching any of their six films together).
These scenes are unfortunately interspersed with filler like the generic love story of Ensign Keith (Robert Francis).
The courtroom scene was later adapted into a play called “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” which itself was turned into a 2023 film with Kiefer Sutherland in the Bogart role and Jason Clarke in Ferrer’s shoes. That film is a rare example of telling, not showing, being the superior storytelling strategy. If you see the glassy look in Queeg’s eye during the typhoon (like in the 1954 film), the ambiguous morality of the mutineers’ actions is removed since you know Queeg is endangering the crew. If you only see the trial and only hear that look described in multiple conflicting ways, uncertainty is created and the tension is heightened.
You should also know that Bogart was the original leader of the Rat Pack, a group of show biz folks who would hang out at Bogie’s place in Holmby Hills. Bogie’s wife Lauren Bacall gave the group their name after saying they “looked like a goddamn rat pack” upon returning from a big party; she later said the group was created as an excuse “to drink a lot of bourbon and stay up late.” Classic. Anyway, Sinatra inherited the title of leader of the pack after Bogie’s death and the reformulated Rat Pack went on to make lots of movies, including the original Ocean’s 11 (1960).
Well, that’s only partially true. Ferrer’s right hand is bandaged up in the movie, but that’s because of a real-life injury to the actor, not any scripted deformity.
He’s the guy who invents Flubber. Robin Williams later also invented Flubber in Flubber (1997).
You could also know his “Marjorie Morningstar,” which was made into a movie with Natalie Wood, and his two-parter about the early history of Israel, “The Hope” and “The Glory.” Those are deeper Wouk cuts, though.
Though there are many ranks that share each of those names (e.g., Seaman Recruit, Seaman Apprentice, Seaman), so it is a simplification to say there are only two.
Though before Fleet Admiral there was the equivalent title Admiral of the Navy, which was only given to George Dewey.
Don’t mix Halsey up with Chester Nimitz, though! Nimitz was another Fleet Admiral who was the Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and led at the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway. Man, you have to know so much WWII stuff for trivia…maybe you should just go read “The Winds of War.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me know when McCartney’s solo career reaches the heights of Ringo’s drunk uncle sing-along “Photograph.”
I guess you should also know that the crew of the Discovery, Henry Hudson’s ship, mutinied so they wouldn’t have to keep looking for the Northwest Passage. They left Hudson in the bay that now bears his name and he was never seen again.
These guys were later captured once Bligh returned to England and got the Royal Navy to sic the HMS Pandora on them.