The Caine Mutiny

Almost a week ago I watched The Caine Mutiny and then forgot about it. I didn't forget it intentionally. It was a really good movie. It also has Humphrey Bogart in it. I have been a Bogart fan longer than I've been a Meryl Streep fan. I've also been working on seeing all of his movies longer than I've been working on the Meryl Streep Project. I'm not going in chronological order for Bogart, some of his earlier stuff is way too hard to find, I'd never get to the good movies. But I've been trying to see all his movies since I was about thirteen or so.

The first one I saw was Casablanca. I think. Or maybe it was Sabrina. But Casablanca was a much more vivid experience. My mother brought it home. Probably from the library. A lot of my favorite things have come from the library - The Avengers DVDs, Keeping up Appearances episodes... mostly British TV. We watched the movie, I was enjoying it. Ingrid Bergman came on screen. In those days, when the most beautiful woman in the movie came on screen they liked to let you know by making the camera all fuzzy. So the camera went all blurry, and there's Ingrid Bergman. This vision. This goddess. I was thirteen and I'd never seen anything so beautiful in my entire life.

This isn't quite the scene, but it will do.

Of course, then I watched Night in Casablanca, the Marx Brothers spoof of the original film. It's not my favorite of theirs, but it has one of the best chase scenes they did and one of the best openings.

And now I've totally deviated from the original idea: The Caine Mutiny. Based on a Broadway play which was based on a novel by Herman Wouk. It's not my favorite Bogart movie, but I still really liked it. It just wasn't that happy. But it's good. It's about this guy who's some lower ranked officer in the Navy, I don't know these things. He's kind of obnoxious and I had the feeling he secretly wanted to be Lieutenant Cable in South Pacific, but wasn't pretty enough. Lower Ranked Officer (LRO) gets assigned to this boat called the USS Caine. Other viewers besides me will probably get the biblical reference here. It took me twenty minutes. The boat's kind of a piece of shit. All the crew are slackers. LRO, because he's kind of high and mighty, gets all sniffy about it and is really happy when a new captain, Bogart, arrives. It soon becomes clear that Bogart is nuts. Having Bogart play anything but Mr. Awesome was a bit jarring. In this one he's nuts. The crew realizes that they're basically fucked and with a little help from a typhoon, they get to a mutiny. There's a trial and really not enough action and adventure. The ending is excellent though. I sat for a minute afterwards and said, "Well fuck." You know, one of those.