The Caine Mutiny has one problem: Lose the love story. It was a big yawn. I’m sure it was the typical movie-makers’ ploy of handling any plot dominated by men. They feared that women wouldn’t see it, without a little bit of romance.
The cross-examination scene is rightly famous. What you see is a man disintegrating under pressure. The facade of his reasoning cracks, and Bogie lets you see the chaos and paranoia inside. I watch it, studying his acting, and ask myself the question: “How …how does he do it?”
The disintegration takes place in one take, which is one of the marks of a true actor. A lesser actor would not be able to pull such a feat off, in continuum. The director would need to call “Cut” and give the actor a second to get to the next phase of the disintegration – and then “Cut” again and so on. But a real actor could actually experience the disintegration, could actually let the camera reveal the crack-up.
This is what he does.
At first, he is cool, reasonable, logical. He has all the answers. Five minutes later, we see that that quality of his of “having all the answers” is the very thing that makes him paranoid and insane. But Bogart doesn’t show his hand too early, which is why I think his work is still so revered today, and will continue to be so. He holds back. He doesn’t show all.
It is when Jose Ferrer (the prosecutor) brings up the infamous “missing strawberries” that Queeg’s veneer cracks.
The second the strawberries come up, he puts his hand in his pocket, reaching for his little rolling silver balls. The security blanket. He finds them soothing. Bogart is not doing it as a “bit”, or as a moment of telegraphing, “Here is where I go nuts.” He does it, because it is what the character would do in that moment. He does it because the character needs those ball bearings.
He starts to ramble on about the grave problem of “pilfering food” on a warship, all the while you can hear the “click-click-click-click” of the rolling balls as he talks.
Watch the scene again.
Watch how Bogie pauses – slightly – before and after the words “geometric logic” … It is there where you can see the genius of the man.
Queeg is rambling on and on about the conspiracy of the ship to make him look like a fool, and he defends his behavior, in terms of the missing strawberries, and in the middle of it, he says that he “proved” with “geometric logic” that such-and-such occurred … but there’s a pause before and after. He tries to think of the right words, he is trying to show how smart he is … so he thinks for a teeny second … and then sputters out “geometric logic”. Bogart makes it look as though it is coming from off the top of his head, even though you know that they began as lines on the page. The way he does it is scary.
Here’s the exact wording of the speech:
Ahh, but the strawberries that’s… that’s where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with… geometric logic… that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist, and I’d have produced that key if they hadn’t of pulled the Caine out of action. I, I, I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow officers…
Madness is frightening, in all its forms … and that “geometric logic” is terrifying.
By the end of the speech it is as though Queeg, suddenly, hears himself … and realizes how long he has been speaking … (all with the scary click-click-click of the rolling balls, an accompaniment to the scene) … and, with this … unbelievably touching look on his face – he subsides.
He knows he has just lost.
In that second, a slight shadow, from outside the window, darkens his brow.
A shadow on this man’s brain.
The obligatory love story is the biggest weakness in dozens of films. It doesn’t work in The Caine Mutiny, not as romance and not as an indication of Keith’s willingness to stand up to the authority figures in his life. Perhaps it might have worked if Robert Francis and May Wynn (she adopted the character’s name as her own) had been blessed with more ability.
I love the pause just before “geometric logic”, the look in Bogart’s eyes as Queeg is trying to think of the right words just makes the entire scene. So is his reaction to Barney’s resolve to produce Ensign Harding.
“I’ll tell you what he’ll say!”
The book is also well worth reading (and the love story *is* in the book; it’s not just something Hollywood threw in). Also, ss I recall, the movie ended after the court martial, whereas the book carries on with the further adventures of Caine and her crew (Willie eventually becomes Captain)
I just didn’t get what the love story had to do with anything. It didn’t reveal anything about Keith … not really. And then there was the whole thing with his mother, the kind of Freudian drama – torn between his mother and the girl. It just seemed like the drama on the Caine was so much more riveting.
And yes – the movie ends with all of them celebrating that Queeg has been brought down – and Jose Ferrer, drunk, comes in and bitches them out – paying homage to the men in combat who gave so much, and who sacrificed sanity, basically, to win the war.
“Queeg was sick, he couldn’t help himself. But you, you’re real healthy. Only you didn’t have one-tenth the guts that he had.”
David: Is the rolling-balls thing in the book? Is that part of the character Wouk wrote?
Sheila..yes, the rolling balls thing is in the book. If memory serves, the movie was pretty true to the book except for the part that I mentioned.
Also, Caine fans might enjoy the post I wrote on what school administrators could learn from Queeg’s experience:
“Philip Queeg Public High School” at
http://photoncourier.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_photoncourier_archive.html#106616477225978957
This is the first movie I remember seeing. It was at a drive in and I remembered the typhoon scene and the ball bearings. Read the book many years later and was struck by how loose and rambling it was compared to the movie. But yes, the love story is nothing more than a drag on the movie. It’s a shame that the vessel for Bogart’s immaculate performance is so flawed. I need to buy this movie and watch it a couple of times.
David:
That was a great post of yours. Thanks. I actually remember reading it, originally … but the Bogie-mania hadn’t begun yet, and I hadn’t seen the film!
Yes, the rigidity of his personality, of course, aids the crack up. Glass shatters.
I think Caine was the first movie were I recognized what a truly gifted actor Jose Ferrer was. The guy had more grace and talent in his pinky than has been seen in a long, long time.
Jose Ferrer as Emperor Shaddam IV prety much singlehandedly makes David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune (which Lynch so disliked as to have his name removed from the credits and replaced with the Directors’ Guild’s generic “Alan Smithee”) tolerably watchable. That is high praise.
(The other performance that makes it less than an unmitigated disaster is from Brad Dourif as Piter de Vries: you can practically see Peter Jackson watching and thinking, “this guy NEEDS to play Wortmtongue.”)
I didn’t know that about Lynch’s Dune. I only saw it because Sting was nearly naked in it.
Every comment I have made today (on every single blog I have commented on) has something to do with sex, it seems.
Ovulation? No idea.
I didn’t really like the movie … but I didn’t know how David Lynch felt about it.
I thought it was pretty much dreadful, although I’ve seen it a bunch of times despite my own best judgment since I love the original book (they get both weaker and weirder the further into the series). Speaking of great lines, though, I do like “remedy the situation or you will live out your life in a pain amplifier.”
If you you were to take Ferrer as the Emperor, Dourif as Piter, Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck, Dean Stockwell as Dr. Yueh and Max von Sydow as Kynes, and put them into the Sci-Fi Channel’s miniseries version of Dune, then THAT would’ve been quite good. Oh, and I suppose you can have Sting in it as Feyd, too, since the other guy cast by SF’s performance was completely forgettable.
“CAINE MUTINY” and the much-newer film “A FEW GOOD MEN” seem cut out of the same cloth. Both are military court-room dramas based upon views of authority gone haywire. I like both films, but CAINE is a much smarter, and adult, movie, even with that dopy romance.
“A Few Good Men” always struck me as contrived, too much of an obvious morality play. But it certainly did have some great lines. Nicholson’s grandstanding ones are the ones everyone remembers, but my favorite is actually by Tom Cruise as Caffey:
“Thank you for playing Should We, or Should We Not, Take the Advice of the Galactically Stupid…”
I like A FEW GOOD MEN. I prefer CAINE, though, and think it’s a more honest film. In MEN the bad guy is a vile military leader who is exposed through tricky court-room maneuvering as a homicide-enabling blowhard. In CAINE, though, the “villain” is a guy who doesn’t realize all his screws have been stripped from his experiences in combat. The real “villains” turn out to be the mutineers who thought of authority as a popularity contest, and betrayed him. I don’t like Queeg, but in the long run the mutineers were a lot more dangerous. To me, CAINE blows MEN out of the water, so to speak.