about as complex as a doodle

Rating: 1/10 (2 February 2008)

In order to provide Bogart with Oscar attempts at the end of his career he jumped to supposedly complex roles, which were often just 2-dimensional heels. Bogart was a professional but it was his bad fortune to require these roles in the '50s, a very poor time for drama; the doldrums between noir and the French new wave. There probably is a great drama to be generated from a supposed U.S. mutiny. It very well might star Humphrey Bogart as a character like Captain Queeg. If this had been made in the forties it would have had a chance, but by the fifties dramatic efforts had become regressive and shallow, mired in spectacle and production merits as a tool to wedge people away from their sofas and TVs.
The 2nd half devolves into the standard dumb courtroom sequence, a format beloved by crappy writers for it's ability to infuse some cheap drama into a movie. Will there be surprise testimony? an outburst? Will a jerky witness shoot himself in the foot? ...can you name a single movie with a courtroom scene where two of those three things don't occur?
Robert Francis plays the wholly unnecessary part of a whitebread, dull as-a-post Momma's boy who finds it easier to mutiny than he does to put his mother in her place. Oy vey! He also kills time in a conventional love story that has no reason to be here. The sub-plot might as well have aliens in it, for how little any of it matters. The signature characterization of Queeg as an insecure guy who nervously plays with some steel balls at moments of vulnerability is as thin as paper. Van Johnson is the only actor here who's asked to show any range.
The largest of the movies sins after its hokey dramatic arc is the infuriating over-scoring of the movie. Max Steiner, never a very imaginative composer, takes two motifs; an original theme, and From the Halls of Montezuma, and blares them endlessly to convey two points: "The plot is thickening" and "Although we all hate Captain Queeg, we're still pro-military!" Mmmmm, won't you please, please, please pound me over the head with one of these two stupid music selections again? This is the last time I can watch an over-scored movie from between 1930 and 1960. I really cannot bear anymore of this unsubtlety after Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick, The Heiress, etc.
This movie is about as complex as a game of tic-tac-toe, and perhaps about as compelling. If you want to see Bogart play a heel, just rent Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I'm with Dave Kehr who wrote, "Dymytrk's ham-fisted direction does little to alleviate the obviousness of the drama and the thinness of the characterizations" But I can sum those points up even quicker, "Pffff-f-f-f-ffft!"