Actors - The Caine Mutiny

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	Actors - The Caine Mutiny

The Caine Mutiny, a 1954 movie directed by Edward Dmytryk, was based on Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize-winning (1951), best-selling novel and subsequent stage hit (The Caine Mutiny Court Martial). It also provided Humphrey Bogart with the next-to-last great role of his acting career, and earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, one of seven Oscar nominations the film received. Director Dmytryk was also nominated for a Directors' Guild Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, a spectacular comeback for a man only three years removed from prison as one of the Hollywood Ten.

The tale is of a mutiny aboard a fictitious, rag-run World War II U.S. Navy minesweeper, the U.S.S. Caine, provoked by the ongoing tensions between a by-the-book, battle-fatigued, and isolated captain, Lt. Cmdr. Philip F. Queeg (Bogart), and his senior officers: dedicated but troubled executive officer Lt. Stephen Maryk (Van Johnson); cynical, duplicitous communications officer Lt. Thomas Keefer (Fred MacMurray, cast against type); and deck officer Ens. Willie Keith (Robert Francis), whose coming of age from spoiled society brat to hard-learned shipman is one of the novel's subtexts. Queeg's instability graduates from hint to outright suspicion among his officers following an embarrassing sea exercise incident and a series of apparently petty shipboard incidents. Then Maryk---formerly one of Queeg's few defenders, or at least one senior officer who first refuses to hang him without better cause than interpretation, in spite of Keefer's continuous and (seemingly) well-measured criticisms---invokes articles of the Navy code to relieve Queeg's command during a typhoon at sea that nearly capsizes the sprawling minesweeper, as a series of ineffectual measures ordered by Queeg exposes the captain's fragile mind.

The Caine Mutiny earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Tom Tully), Best Screenplay, Best Sound Recording, Best Film Editing, and Best Dramatic Score (Max Steiner). None of the nominations won; Bogart lost to Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront as Best Actor; he would finally win the award in due course for The African Queen. Jose Ferrer turned in a stellar supporting performance as the Navy attorney assigned reluctantly to defend mutineers Maryk and Keith; E.G. Marshall turned in an equivalent performance as the court martial's lead prosecutor. The title role, USS Caine, was played by the Navy minesweeper USS Thompson (DMS-38).

The Navy initially objected to the film's depiction of a mentally unbalanced man as the captain of one of its ships and the word "mutiny" in the film's title. But after the script was altered somewhat, the Navy cooperated with Columbia Pictures by providing ships, planes, combat boats, and access to Pearl Harbor and the San Francisco port. Following the credits, the epigraph claims that the film's story is non-factual. No ship named USS Caine ever existed, and no Navy captain has been relieved of command at sea under Articles 184-186 and "There has never been a mutiny in a ship of the United States Navy. The truths of this film lie not in its incidents but in the way a few men meet the crisis of their lives."

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