Novel Film

Rating: Null/10 (29 September 2001)

There have already been almost 30 comments on this film and I agree with most of the points made, so I'd like to say a few things about the translation of Wouk's novel in film. The comparison sheds some light on what some people have seen as weaknesses in the film, and it brings up I think the problem that some strong points in the novel are lacking in the movie.
First, the novel is big and fat, but it is Wouk's best if only because it has a tense, nicely honed narrative and is in fact a rattling good tale. It's a fine novel in many respects. The bonds between Willie and May, and between Willie and his mother, belongs. They provide a kind of parallel to his character's maturing aboard ship. Unfortunately, the main narrative of the film needs to be so condensed already that his romances should have been left out.
The movie needed to be longer, I'm afraid, even without the 1950s love interest. What emerges gradually in the novel is thrust in our faces in the film in order to pack as much action and drama into the visuals as possible. The episode in which Queeg's cowardice becomes apparent, instead of involving an engagement between the Caine and a single shore battery, has the ship plowing through a forest of spouting explosions. We've seen it before. And the typhoon, when it comes, doesn't build in intensity; it's suddenly there on screen, hitting like a sledgehammer. It's not the fault of the screenwriters. They've done a good job of investing the residual lines with meaning, and even provide a new one that perhaps should have been in the novel: when Queeg is introducing himself to his wardroom he makes the remark that, "The way those subs ganged up on us, I thought they had it in for me personally." Neat! The novel also has a long introductory section on Willie at midshipman school which was properly left out. (As it was left out of the Reader's Digest condensation.)
Wouk's book has little in it about anti-Semitism in the Navy, except to say that when it occurs, it's overridden by the anti-Semite's sense of fairness. The speech about Judaism given by Greenwald at the party reflects his own worries. He's railing against Hitler, not the Navy. Wouk's book reflects a patronizing attitude towards the crew, who are uniformly small minded and mostly dumb, and who are variously derided repeatedly as "animals" or "admired for the pure morning light that is in them," which only tells us that Wouk found nothing to admire in them or he wouldn't have resorted to such junk. Mercifully, this class snobbery is barely apparent in the film.
A few more irresistible points. All the characters are too old for their parts. And, if they had to use the romantic subplot, where in God's name did they find Robert Francis and "May Wynn"? (That name, by the way, was already too top-heavy with symbolism.) Willie is a pivotal character in the book, if not in the film, and poor Robert Francis looks like a pug-nosed spoiled kid at the beginning, where it may be appropriate, and also at the end, where it's not. At no place in the film does he do anything that resembles acting. The final exchange between Greenwald and Bogart is fine except that it comes and goes too quickly. The disintegration in the novel, a result of the traps laid by Greenwald, seems a sudden and hardly motivated fracture in the movie. The first captain, Tom Tully, is described in the book as having "a voice filled with irony and authority." Tully, whom I've often admired, reduces this complexity to simple sarcasm and contempt. Maybe he didn't have time to do more. And Greenwald in the novel is given a shambling, almost shy demeanor, like Lieutenant Columbo, completely at odds with his courtroom cleverness, so that his forceful questioning comes as a shocking surprise. Jose Ferrer misses this and comes across as consistently sharp and resolute.
I enjoy this film each time I see it. Yet, one look at the relatively new destroyer that poses as the Caine and one yearns for the broken-down World War I hulk of a converted minesweeper that was the Caine in the novel. Someday, someone might make a truly great film out of this finely written novel. They keep remaking classics that don't need improvement. Here's one that could use some updating. Imagine that climactic typhoon with CGI.