The Caine Mutiny (film)

Herman Wouk had already adapted his novel as a stage play, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which premiered on Broadway in January 1954 and ran for more than a year. The play was directed by Charles Laughton and was a critical as well as a commercial success.[6] Wouk was initially selected to write the screenplay, but director Dmytryk thought his work was not successful. He replaced the novelist with Stanley Roberts, an experienced screenwriter. Roberts later quit the production after being told to cut the screenplay so the film could be kept to two hours. The 50 pages worth of cuts were made by Michael Blankfort, who received an "additional dialog" credit.[7]

The film differs from the novel, which focused on the Keith character, who became secondary in the film. The film instead focuses on Queeg.[6] Kramer "mollified the Navy" by modifying the Queeg characterization to make him less of a madman, as portrayed by Wouk, and more a victim of battle fatigue.[8] Studios did not want to purchase the film rights to Wouk's novel until cooperation of the U.S. Navy was settled.[9] Independent producer Stanley Kramer purchased the rights himself for an estimated $60,000 – $70,000. The Navy's reluctance to cooperate led to an unusually long pre-production period of fifteen months. Principal photography took place between June 3 and August 24, 1953 under the initial working title of Authority and Rebellion.[10]

Stanley Kramer and Columbia Pictures intended to cast Humphrey Bogart as Philip Queeg. Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn knew that Bogart wanted the part and took advantage of that fact, and he was eventually able to force Bogart to settle for much less than his usual $200,000 salary. "This never happens to Cooper or Grant or Gable, but always to me", Bogart complained to his wife, Lauren Bacall.[7]

Van Johnson was loaned to Columbia by MGM, where he was under contract. Being cast as Maryk was a breakthrough for the actor, who felt that he had been in a "rut" by being typecast in light roles. During the filming of the scene off Oahu in which Maryk swims fully clothed to retrieve a line, his character is warned that there are sharks in the water; these sharks do not appear on camera, but the actor's life was saved when a real-life Navy rifleman shot one which was approaching.[8] Lee Marvin was cast as one of the sailors, not only for his acting, but also because of his knowledge of ships at sea. Marvin had served in the U.S. Marines from the beginning of American involvement in World War II through the Battle of Saipan in 1944, during which he was wounded. As a result, he became an unofficial technical advisor for the film.[7]

Before choosing Dmytryk for The Caine Mutiny, Kramer had hired the director for three low-budget films. Dmytryk had previously been blacklisted, and the success of the film helped revive his career.[11]

The USS Rodman, a Gleaves-class destroyer minesweeper, was one of the ships chosen to represent the USS Caine in the film. The Rodman had one less smokestack than the actual Clemson-class destroyers on which Wouk served, and had more anti-aircraft guns. Completed in 1941, she was a much more modern ship than the 1918-manufactured Clemson-class destroyer minesweepers had been. True to the theme of the novel, the actual minesweepers of Wouk's service, the Zane and the Southard, were both outdated ships by the time the film was made. The Zane was retired shortly after the war, and the Southard was scuttled in October 1945 after running aground in Okinawa with Wouk serving as Executive Officer. One of the primary inspirations for the book and the movie came from Wouk's experience as second in command of the Southard when she ran aground in Okinawa as a result of Typhoon Ida in September 1945.[12][13][14][15]

The Caine Mutiny would be the first feature role in Robert Francis's short four-film Hollywood career, as he was killed when the private plane he was piloting crashed shortly after takeoff from Burbank Airport in California on July 31, 1955.[16]

The Navy was initially uncomfortable with both the portrayal of a mentally unbalanced man as the captain of one of its ships and the word "mutiny" in the film's title. After Stanley Roberts' shooting script was completed and approved by the Navy after 15 months of negotiations, the Department agreed to cooperate with Columbia Pictures by providing access to its ships, planes, combat boats, Pearl Harbor, the port of San Francisco, and Naval Station Treasure Island for filming. Dmytryk recalled in his memoir that after "noisy" protests from the Navy subsided, the film production received wholehearted cooperation.[11] This included the conversion of two soon to be decommissioned destroyer/destroyer minesweepers, USS Thompson (DD-627/DMS-38) and USS Doyle (DD-494/DMS-34), as facsimiles to portray the USS Caine.[17][18]

An epigraph appears on screen immediately following the opening credits that reads: "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."[7] In 1842, an incipient mutiny was quashed before it occurred on board the US Navy Brig USS Somers.[19]

In addition to the Pearl Harbor and San Francisco Bay Area locations, including the Caine steaming back and forth several times under the Golden Gate Bridge, the romantic subplot features scenes shot on location at Yosemite National Park.[20]

This was the last of a number of Bogart films scored by composer Max Steiner, mostly for Warner Bros. The main title theme, The Caine Mutiny March, was included in RCA Victor's collection of classic Bogart film scores, recorded by Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic Orchestra.[21]

The lyrics of the song, "Yellowstain Blues", which mocked Queeg's perceived cowardice during the landing incident, were drawn from The Caine Mutiny, the novel by Herman Wouk on which the film was based.[22]

The original soundtrack album for The Caine Mutiny was not officially released until 2017, and copies of the soundtrack made before that are very rare. Perhaps a dozen copies survive. RCA Victor planned an LP release with musical excerpts on the first side and the complete dialogue of the climactic court-martial scene on side two, but Herman Wouk believed that including this scene was an infringement on his recently opened Broadway play dealing with the court-martial. He threatened to prohibit Columbia Pictures from making any further adaptations of his work. According to Wouk, "Columbia head Harry Cohn looked into the matter, called me back, and said in his tough gravelly voice, 'I've got you beat on the legalities, but I've listened to the record and it's no goddamn good, so I'm yanking it.'" Max Steiner's score was finally released by Intrada Records in 2017 as Special Collection Volume ISC 382.[23]

American Film Institute Lists

• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – Nominated[31]
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains:
  • Lt. Commander Philip Francis Queeg – Nominated Villain[32]
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
  • "Ah, but the strawberries! That's--that's where I had them." – Nominated[33]
• AFI's 10 Top 10 – Nominated Courtroom Drama[34]

When Michael Caine, born Maurice Micklewhite, first became an actor he adopted the stage name "Michael White". He was later told by his agent that another actor was already using the same name, and that he had to come up with a new one immediately. Speaking to his agent from a telephone box in Leicester Square in London, he looked around for inspiration. Being a fan of Bogart, he noted that The Caine Mutiny was being shown at the Odeon Cinema, and adopted a new name from the movie title. Caine has often joked in interviews that, had he looked the other way, he would have ended up as "Michael One Hundred and One Dalmatians".[36]

Vince Gilligan used a clip of the film in a Breaking Bad episode titled "Madrigal", originally transmitted in 2012, and has stated that The Caine Mutiny was one of his favorite movies as a child.[37] The final scene of "Chicanery", an episode of the Breaking Bad spinoff series Better Call Saul, is an homage to the film's climactic courtroom scene.[38]

In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, members of the human resistance serve aboard the submarine USS Jimmy Carter piloted by a reprogrammed Terminator that has been named "Queeg" by the crew.[39]

In the Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine", the obsessive Commodore Matt Decker, portrayed by William Windom, fusses constantly with two futuristic tape cartridges, much as Captain Queeg rubs together two bearing balls. Windom publicly acknowledged that Decker's behavior was based on Queeg's.[40]