If we feel sorry for Queeg, do we have to pity Nixon, too?

Rating: 10/10 (19 March 2014)

From the moment Captain Philip Francis Queeg gives the original version of Richard Milhous Nixon's infamous "Checkers Speech" (as in, "I'm really not that bad of a guy--even my little dog likes me"), it's clear that the fictional paranoid Naval Captain Queeg is the template for the all-too-real paranoid President Nixon. (President Reagan famously kept jars of jelly beans in the Oval Office; after watching THE CAINE MUTINY you'll swear that "Tricky Dick" must have had bowls of ball bearings there to finger whenever he felt a "Saturday Night Massacre" coming on). Queeg's irrational behavior threatens to scuttle a fictional Navy "rust bucket." Nixon's psychotic "Reign of Terror" nearly destroyed America a decade after this movie came out. As THE CAINE MUTINY illustrates, historically male hierarchy systems are prone to the sort of blind "Groupthink" which can march a ship's crew off the figurative gang plank, or an entire nation off the cliff into history's dust bin (where is the Third Reich today?). Words such as "military discipline" and "chain of command" often are code for De Facto suicide pacts. Unfortunately, such infectious thinking has seeped into our civilian sector today (who's the Queeg\Nixon in YOUR work place?). THE CAINE MUTINY would have been immortalized as the "Best Picture" of 1954, except for a "Yellowstain" performance, involving a craven recantation, in real life blotting the reputation of the man Oscar-nominated for playing Queeg, Humphrey Bogart. Ironically, "Bogie" aped "Caine" crew member "Tom Keefer's" cowardly retreat from Admiral Halsey and subsequent lying during "Steve Maryk's" court martial by wimping out in front of the Blacklist Witch Trials in Washington, DC, when he could have asked Joe McCarthy, "Have you no decency; no sense of shame; not an ounce of respect for America?" Bogart had only himself to blame for the rest of Academy voters following his example by caving in to runaway fascism, and presenting an undeserved "politically correct" Best Picture award in 1954 instead to a far inferior film Helmed by a back-stabbing snitch: ON THE WATERFRONT.