Bogart's masterpiece

Rating: 9/10 (23 October 2006)

We all get to serve under a "Captain Queeg" at some point in our lives, so all audiences can identify with the characters in this story. Hermann Wouk, the author of the book, was a US submariner in WW2 and its tempting to speculate as to whether Queeg with his steel marbles was based on a real person. I think the character is most likely a composite, but so many of the sequences, like the "strawberry incident" ring true to anyone who has served in the armed forces or large bureaucracies.
Humphrey Bogart, ably supported by a star cast, does an masterful job with an extremely demanding role. A lesser actor could easily have killed the part and turned the film into a comedy (compare with "Mr. Roberts", which is INTENDED to be a semi-comedy) Bogart's Queeg isn't funny....real ship's captains never are.....but though we identify with the long-suffering crew throughout the "action" part of the film; by the end of the trial, we are starting to get the picture from Queeg's point of view and the US Navy's point of view, and this was always Herman Wouk's intention in the book.
I've always been a Fred MacMurray fan, and I rate his portrayal of the slimy Tom Keefer as top rate. Keefer is another character who we all run into sooner or later in life. I liked Tom Tully's De Vreiss ("War is hell, Willy") and check out the young Lee Marvin as Meatball. Whether Richard Widmark would have made an even better Queeg than Humphrey Bogart is problematic. I think he would have been too laconic and nasty. Bogart's Queeg is incompetent, neurotic and high-strung, but fundamentally not a BAD person, and this is true to Hermann Wouk's literary original. (Widmark didn't miss out. Some years later he was cast as an exceptionally nasty and fatally unbalanced ship's captain)
In style, the film is a good, fast moving presentation let down a little (for modern audiences) by the "toy ships in a bathtub" typhoon sequence. However, I'm sure that state-of-the-art 2006 special effects will appear rather quaint to audiences in 2056, and in any case, how would you go about filming a shipboard sequence in a REAL typhoon.
This film is a true classic, and largely due to Bogart's definitive performance, it would be exceptionally difficult to produce a credible remake. They tried to sneak up on it a few years ago with one called "The Trial of the Caine Mutiny", but that was a flat effort and is in no way comparable to the 50's original.
R. B.