Our Film of the Week, The Caine Mutiny, was one of my father’s favorites, as I remember, and it must have brought him back to his couple of years in the Army, before he and my mother got married. He rose to the rank of sergeant, stationed far away in Colorado and then in Germany. He didn’t talk much about those days, except to say that you had to demand prompt and full obedience to orders, because only then would you have a real army. He led his men on fifty-mile fast-marches in the Colorado mountains, with full gear, the sort of thing you’d never believe you could do until someone demanded it of you. And that brings us to the crux of this film. What happens when the commander cannot command? What happens when either decision you must make is bad?
Somebody wrote, in a review of The Caine Mutiny, that Hollywood of old wasn’t very good at portraying subtle moral problems, preferring instead to dress up everything in black and white. Precisely the reverse is true. Why, even such a celebrated hero as George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life is deeply human and quite problematic, “a frustrated young man” as his enemy Mr. Potter calls him, and he is not entirely wrong about that. In The Caine Mutiny, you’ve got a slovenly ship, the Caine, commanded by a loose sort of fellow whom the mariners love (Tom Tully earned an Oscar nomination for the easygoing Commodore DeVriess), transferred over to a disciplinarian, Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart), who suffers from insecurity and the paranoia that often goes along with it. The three principal persons he must deal with are his second in command, Lt. Maryk (Van Johnson), a brave and sensible seaman not motivated by ambition or resentment, the young and idealistic Ensign Keith (Robert Francis; see him in another military movie we’ve recommended, The Long Gray Line), whom Queeg chooses to be his morale officer, a checker-up of shirt-tails and polished buttons and lights out, and the true villain of the film, the sly whisperer, the suggester of calumnies, the sophisticated author on board, Lt. Keefer (Fred MacMurray, playing the second of his three great bad men; see the first of them in Double Indemnity). When Queeg freezes up during a storm, the whispers go about that he is “yellow,” and that, combined with his disciplinary pettiness, turns the mariners against him. You are in Lt. Maryk’s place — and you see signs that the Captain is not in control of his faculties. Or you believe the suggestions that he is not so. The Captain, swallowing his pride, asks you for your help. What do you do? The film takes place during wartime: your decision one way or the other can cost many men their lives.
If you’ve read Saint Augustine’s Confessions, you’ll recall that it was an apparently trivial bit of wickedness, boys stealing the pears from a neighbor’s tree just for the pleasure of stealing, and then feeding them to the pigs, that pierced to the heart of evil, or rather to the empty space where a heart ought to be. In The Caine Mutiny, it’s the theft of a quart of strawberries, which nobody will own up to — strawberries, of all things, that bring on the showdown between Queeg and everyone on board. We see the man losing his grip, and panicking as he does so, though the panic is understated; we’re never entirely certain that Queeg is going mad. But why have things come to this pass? The writers and the director don’t tell us until the very end of the film — again, I’ll give out no spoilers. It will be revealed, not as a fact we hadn’t known about, but a whole way of considering men’s actions, only after the court-martial that pits Queeg against his former officers, and Queeg against himself. It’s easy to say, “Because I did this thing that was wrong, I ended up paying the price for it.” You can almost look upon it with pride. It is much harder to say, “Because I was not as good or as strong or as loyal or as pure as I could have been, even though I passed for a very good sort of person, other people paid the price for it.”
The performances in this film are first-rate, all of them. Tully and Bogart earned Oscar nominations, but those could just have easily gone to Francis, MacMurray, and the defense attorney, Jose Ferrer — and I’d have given Ferrer the nod. The rest of the cast? Great supporting roles from the likes of Lee Marvin, E. G. Marshall (the clear-thinking and relentless prosecutor), Claude Akins, Steve Brodie, and Jerry Paris (who went on to be one of television’s best directors of comedy; but you can see him as the put-upon and henpecked kid brother in Marty). Watch the film with your older kids and ask, afterwards, “Were they really right to do what they did?” Trust us — that conversation will be a fruitful one.
Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add comments to our posts and discussions.
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We are fortunate today to have the full film available on Internet Archive. Click on the film poster below to watch.
Insightful and educational for those of us who fight wickedness in the guise of the culture of death, and do so because we love truth.
A librarian once deemed it safe to recommend the book to me when I was a high school student because, she said, "It has no cuss words." The same applies to this film's powerful story told without a scurrilous word; the only exception that I recall would be Tom Tully's character drolly saying, "Mr. Keith, don't you know war is Hell?" The Caine Mutiny is a unique film from which the Court-Martial portion was carved out and crafted into a Broadway play plus two other movies, one in 1988 and another in 2023.