THE CAINE MUTINY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 799, 12 November 1954, Page 26

THE CAINE MUTINY

(Stanley Kramer-Columbia) HAVE often thought (perhaps too often; certainly not without some ‘smug Britannic self-satisfaction) that Americans have a weakness for psychoanalysing their emotions and behaviour which is in itself positively Freudian. But the habit can be catching. The practice of it, of course, involves one in the use of jargon. You don’t (as I apprehend it) call a spade a spade- it’s more likely to become a fertility-sym-bol, or a fetish-object, or possibly a de-fence-mechanism. And _ old-fashioned, home-made (and emotive) words like envy, hate, lust, fear and cowardice give way to streamlined "non-polarised" locutions calculated not to disturb’ the patient. But while I can’t gainsay the dramatic value of the technique (which can blow up a mere pimple of vanity into a volcano of hypertension), I have a deep-and possibly atavistic-distrust of it. In particular, I have usually found it irksome to discover Freud in the foxholes and fo’c’sles of Hollywood war films. Even Lewis Milestone’s Halls of Montezuma, in many ways a fine piece of cinema, irritated me with its crop of battle neuroses. I would have felt more at home if they had been plain cases of funk. And yet, in spite of that overburden of prejudice I must admit that I have

found no novel of the war at sea more engrossing than The Caine Mutiny-where the mainspring of the plot is the psychological. eccentricity of a destroyer commander. And, with certain reservations, I felt the same about the film. Captain Queeg, of the Caine, is nothing short of a naval disaster. He is a petty tyrant where rules and regulations are concerned. He "compensates" for a deep-seated selfdistrust by harrying his subordinates, he is mean and shifty-eyed; he is a shocking navigator, he is a coward (or an inadequately adjusted paranoic, if you prefer the terminology of the naval psychiatric board). There is, undoubtedly, something morbid in the fascination of his story. As he flounders from one crisis to another, Queeg is progressively stripped of all semblance of dignity and normality. In the end it is the very nakedness of his shame that wins back a

measure of our sympathy. The novel takes just on 500 pages to tell the story of the Caine-and of the "mutiny" that relieved Queeg of com-

mand at the height of a typhoon. Much of the book was unnecessary to 'the film, (continued on next page)

and has been dropped, but reduction of the rest to manageable length has entailed a compression and acceleration of events that drives the action forward at an unnaturally hectic. pace. One short sequence, im which Queeg uncharacteristically makes a bid for the sup-, port of his officers, has been interpolated -apart from that the condensation is generally efficient and effective. Taut is (1 suppose) the word for Dmytryk’s direction, and in general the photography is good, with the exception of a quantity of footage wasted on a tank-model and an artificial storm. And the acting is first-class. Humphrey Bogart’s Queeg matches in quality his performance in The African Queen-indeed, the more I see of him, the more I admire his capacity. Van Johnson and Fred MacMurray are also admirably cast, the former as the Executive Officer Maryk, the latter as Tom Keefer, the smoothtalking trouble-maker. And I would like to have seen more of José Ferrer. He made an excellent Greenwald. But Bogert holds the eye, even though he rarely meets it. He’s good. As Queeg would have said, I kid you not!