In the navy

Rating: 6/10 (10 May 2017)

The Caine Mutiny is regarded as a classic thriller of a mutiny aboard a naval ship in World War II that turns into a court room saga. In fact 'A Few Good Men' is really an updated remake.
The destroyer Caine is a small creaky old ship whose rather relaxed captain is replaced by Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart) a disciplinarian. As time goes on he upsets both his officers and crew and shows signs of paranoia, stress and even cowardice.
Lieutenant Thomas Keefer (Fred MacMurray) who was a writer before being called up notices the signs of mental illness and tries to convince Executive Officer Steve Maryk (Van Johnson) to do something about it. Maryk refuses at first but finally takes over command when in a storm Queeg nearly capsizes the ship.
Maryk and some of the other officers stand trial for mutiny and they are reluctantly defended by Lieutenant Barney Greenwald (Jose Ferrer) only after other military lawyers have turned them down.
Of course it is not going to take much for Greenwald to expose Queeg's instability, under intense pressure Queeg takes out his stress balls. However Greenwald reserves his ire after the trial on Keefer for engineering the mutiny so one day he can publish a book about it and Maryk as well as others for not helping Queeg when he asked for help and it was clear he had seen too much of war.
The film loses focus often when it concentrates on an irrelevant love story between an Ensign and his girlfriend. The film also has an uneven tone, not helped by the musical score.
However Bogart delivers another 'against type' performance. His Queeg starts out confidently before spiralling downwards. There is solid support from Van Johnson and Fred McMurray whose character really is cynical and slippery, therefore rightly exposed at the end of the movie.