Saw The Caine Mutiny (thanks, Chris.) It was one of those (slightly stuffy) old 50s dramas. As the name implies, there is a mutiny on a navy ship, but when it comes, it is only as a result of an old struggle in the armed forces (Warning: I know very, very little about the military. Any gross misuses of lingo are not ironic.) This is the struggle between the precise but astringent (see the film Patton for what I'm thinking of here) vs the sloppy but humane (see M*A*S*H, a military which by the way looks a lot more like the "war is hell"-style of films (eg All Quiet on the Western Front) than anything in Patton does.)
The film begins with the lax Capt Challee in charge. Much to the horror of the fresh out of academy Keith (our avatar in this film,) Challee forgoes the requirements of dress and haircut for his crew. The men seem surly, but only to the new recruit. We viewers watch tensely, waiting for the captain to clench his fist and begin to unite the men and Keith under his tyranny. At last, we think we see him begin to show his fangs, but it's a fake-out. Challee's leaving. Enter Captain Queeg.
Queeg is the hard type, nervously fondling steel ball-bearings and played by Humphrey Bogart at his snarliest. Keith at first loves his attention to detail and order, but soon becomes disillusioned after he sees Queeg let a petty error get blown out of proportion and into the way of much more important affairs. Soon, he is siding with the other Lieutenants, one of whom darkly murmurs that Queeg has gone mad.
Punctuating this (and keeping with my pet "order vs humanity" reading) is Keith's romance with a showgirl. This romance is passive-aggressively but staunchly opposed by his twittering mother, the voice of an old-fashioned order. Keith feels his shore-life is too precious to be spent worrying about mother but the showgirl refuses (his mother will never give her approval and he will never be truly happy without it, she mysteriously concludes.) According to my understanding, this sort of thing went on a lost post-WW2. Old fashioned codes of conduct gave way to a more laissez-faire style as soldiers came back from the war with a fresh appreciation for the important things in life.
At last, in both naval and romantic fronts, the humanists win out (as they usually do in movies.) Keep in mind however that this is 1954. Law and order was very much in favor at this point (to gather evidence for this wild assertion, I checked up on the status of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the time and found this chart of McCarthy's public opinion. This film was released in January. Note the bump.) and the law and order types have the last laugh. In a post mutinee-trial coda, a lawyer lectures the mutineers for pathologizing and neutering an old man, disregarding his service and experience. This feels a bit tacked-on to me, but then I'm not the law-&-order type, so I may just be bitter. It also satisfyingly give one character the browbeating he deserves, so I don't complain too much.
A fun film, a bit stuffy and self-serious at times, but an entertainingly tense drama at heart.
Edit: How appropriate.
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