powerful, slightly flawed drama, with unfortunate parallels to today

Rating: 8/10 (9 February 2017)

Digression, first of all.
Look, I can't help but see a film sometimes and see parallels to current events and certain men elevated to power. I'm not intentionally looking for it, and with The Caine Mutiny I happened to have this film to watch as it was part of a list I was checking off and near the end of. But after the first three weeks (and before that, eighteen months in campaign/president-elect mode) of Trump's time in office, it's impossible to not see the parallels with him and Captain Queeg (though I'd say at least Queeg didn't seem to come from a life of privilege and yes men).
And at first it wasn't readily apparent - Queeg comes off in his first scenes like a tough taskmaster, but perhaps nothing out of the ordinary for hard-case Captains in the navy or army and so on - but as one notices the decisions he makes, or doesn't make, or what he focuses his attention on (all men having their shirts tucked in is one thing, but during a ship maneuver that requires his attention, or the whole 'strawberry' incidence) and then quickly dismisses the reality around him as hogwash and act like the ship was in a poor state that had to be completely overhauled (and it didn't, and his aims to make it better just come off as... strange somehow). Well.... do you get the idea yet? How about ignoring or dismissing the council or advice of personnel that may, just may, arguably, know better? What do you do with someone in charge who has mental illness? Would Queeg win in an election (just barely)?
Okay, so where is this whole train of thought taking me to? Does it accomplish much? Probably not in anything that can change anything, but as someone who writes and thinks critically about such things it's curious to see such patterns repeating themselves in history. But besides all of that, and whatever it can do, I should be here to tell you whether the movie is good or not. It is at times an excellent picture, with some caveats that I'll get to, and most of all the reasons to see it are for the screenplay, which is a wonderful adaptation by Stanley Roberts of the Woulk novel, and Humphrey Bogart.
Though he isn't the only notable performance of the film - Van Johnson does a lot with a character that isn't the brightest guy but knows right from wrong, and in his whole career this should be marked as one of Fred MacMurray's major accomplishments, in the subtlety of what he does - Bogart brings a vulnerability to this man, a sense that there's something mixed up even in the moments when he's in command and the men respect him. He never overplays a thing, and because it's Bogart at first as the audience we want to give him the benefit of the doubt... about what, it becomes clear, is hard to tell. But he also sells on the eventual reality of the mental instability of Queeg, like with the rattling of the balls in his hand, but at the same time we don't misunderstand him. How he got to this point even has a small ring of tragedy: was he always this untrusting and paranoid and mentally unstable? Surely being in the navy for eight years he was competent and a good officer. So there's a small ring of tragedy amid the rest of the drama.
What makes the script stand out is that it gets better, more compelling, as the movie goes along. In the first twenty minutes it's watchable, but it doesn't feel like much in the way of conflict is going to happen, as the direction from Dymytryk is standard - competent but nothing to remark upon - and he lays in too much of the score (not a bad one by Steiner by any means, but 'too much' can be a problem when a scene should only have dialog), and the performance from Robert Francis, as it is through a lot of the film, is stiff and too basic (although it occurred to me, aside from it being his debut as an actor, it was part of the point to have one guy who was a straight-arrow officer, but even with this he lacks any personality to sell anything, which includes the bits with his girlfriend May Wynn, who is also only okay).
But once Queeg comes on the ship the picture takes off in a clearer direction and becomes engrossing simply by the nature of this man - his unpredictability, his lack of responsibility in key moments or ignoring things told to him (those mess hall guys ate the strawberries! rats!) What will be the tipping point and then, after this, how is the court martial going to proceed?
This last section is anchored by EG Marshall on one side and Jose Ferrer on the other, and is chock-a-block with dialog (later Altman would make a TV movie out of a play called the Caine Mutiny Court Martial), and all of it comes off from these actors in excellent ways. What does law and order mean in such a situation? Though not all of the acting is great, and near the very end a scene with Jose Ferrer seems to be there to spell out a lot of things that could have been handled with less melodrama, there's a wonderful morality and questioning of power to this story, about taking a long hard look at what happens when it's "The right way, the wrong way, the Navy way, and my way." It can be applied to a lot of things in real life, which is what makes it stick in the mind... probably too well now...