“It’s all ball bearings these days!”

I’m told that Altman’s TV-movie version, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, is superior to this one; I’ll have to check that out. I read the book back in high school and was riveted for three days; the Bogey version isn’t quite as exciting, but it’s quite good, and what it does well, it does very well. Bogart is exceptional. I don’t know if he’d already gotten sick by the time TCM was filmed, but he did seem more dyspeptic and twitchy than usual. Everything about him comes off kind of musty and rotting; you find yourself staring at his overbite in a lot of the shots, wondering how you never noticed how pronounced it is.

The action bits have some real flair, too. There’s one sequence where the camera is sort of over the gunner’s shoulder, and the covering aircraft are sweeping down really close to the boats…it felt like an Army training film, really loud and exciting. Even the typhoon is a nail-biter, even though it’s very obvious the director told the actors to pretend the boat was listing, and just turned the camera at a 30-degree angle while everyone in the scene leaned as tensely as possible and a PA threw buckets of water through a porthole every few minutes.

But what the movie doesn’t do well, it really really doesn’t do well. (See above.) The romantic subplot adds nothing; I suppose it’s designed to make us care about Ensign Keith, but Robert Francis isn’t quite the actor that that requires, and on top of that, May Wynn looks 15 years older than Francis. This is in part a function of early-to-mid-fifties styling, which has exactly zero nuance. Either you’re a schoolmarm, or you’re a va-va-voom mermaid with flossy platinum hair and bright red lipstick. Either you’re 12 years old, with pigtails and saddle shoes…or you’re middle-aged, with that heavy, wavy short hairstyle and a skirt that cuts you off at the fat part of the calf. It’s got to be the dowdiest women’s-fashion era of the 20th century, and the women who aren’t matroned out are draggy overcorrections in the other direction — Monroe, Mansfield, et al.

And the last scene, good grief. “Drunk” is harder to act than you’d think, but Ferrer isn’t even trying except for a few initial stagger-steps, and the final series of speeches feels tacked on, an attempt to argue a point of view the movie doesn’t seem to share. Maybe they were afraid they’d inadvertently shat on the Navy; less than ten years after WWII ended, that could have been a concern, culturally. Or maybe they wanted to semi-rehabilitate Queeg out of respect for Bogart. Bogart’s portrayal is unstinting, and he does a great job making Queeg pathetic as well as despicable, but…pathetic and despicable, and an OCD case who cracked under pressure. Not exactly Bogart’s image.

If you rent it, you can skip the “you won’t marry me because your mother won’t approve, boo hoo” bits; you won’t miss anything, and without them (and the overwrought ending), the movie is about right.

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