great movie, fine performances all around

Rating: Null/10 (5 May 2000)

Watching Van Johnson's confusion, his desperate attempts to do the right thing and his inability to understand when things go wrong make his perhaps the best performance in "Caine". But the gradations get pretty fine, since his, Bogart, MacMurray and Ferrer each are career making acting displays: none really need to put anything else on their resume. The nuanced writing allows situations to appear to be one thing, only to turn out entirely differently--this movie is full of contradictions. The bad guy isn't really the bad guy, the good guys are far from good, and even the savior, Jose Ferrer, turns in a magic tirade near the end that really shatters any hope of the viewer trying to keep a straight good-evil dichotomy mindset. In fact, the long speech he makes could easily have turned preachy and didactic, but the clever writing and his strong acting avoided that.
Unfortunately, the flaw in the movie is much as others have noted: it has an enormous hole in the center where the main character is supposed to be. Ensign Keith is a poor character and Robert Francis plays him horribly. Good enough for B Movie Westerns and Sci Fi, but simply not in the same league as everyone else. And the love story should have been edited out--it's distracting and pointless. There is some argument for having a vapid character kind of surveying the events, as a kind of stand in for the viewer, but here it kind of empties out the center of the movie, only the strong performances of the other actors and the writing keep the whole thing from imploding, collapsing into a big mess.
Bogie of course should have won an Oscar for that performance, really remarkable. His later work is too often overlooked, as it is his best.
I'm not a huge Herman Wouk (author of the book) fan and usually find his writing to be a bit bloated and dry. But he's given impetus to really one of the best movies ever made.