If you liked "Crimson Tide", see "The Caine Mutiny"

Rating: 8/10 (26 June 1999)

When there is a conflict on a ship there is nowhere to go and no higher authority than the Captain. What if the captain is wrong? What if he is so wrong that he jeopardizes the ship? What if he is so wrong that he jeopardizes the world, as we saw in "Crimson Tide"? This is the dramatic question of these movies.
Captain Queeg, played flawlessly by Humphrey Bogart, is only slightly mentally ill, but it's just enough to provoke a mutiny of good upstanding Naval Officers in the middle of World War II, almost all of whom would never dream of mutiny in a thousand years.
Unlike Denzel Washington in "Crimson Tide", there is no real "good guy" in this one. You come away from the movie convinced that a. Everyone was wrong, and b. Everyone did the best they knew how. Tough moral choices are made, and, as I said, there's no where to go for help and no one to appeal to.
Fred MacMurray portrays one of the more interesting characters I've seen in movies, and Van Johnson is the career Navy First Officer who slowly becomes convinced that his captain is paranoid. One tiny complaint, though. The love story seemed tacked on and irrelevant. If you don't care, you can fast forward through it and you don't miss anything.