Word: queeg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...book, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, packed in Broadway theatergoers for two seasons and grossed about $2,500,000. The movie piled up a box office take of $12 million and is still going. Like many a giant industry, the Caine even spawned byproducts, e.g., the manufacture of "Queeg balls," modeled on the two steel bearings that the skipper of the Caine obsessively rolled in his left palm whenever his nerves were shaky...
...rehearsals went on, it was soon clear that members of the cast were gaining inner satisfaction from watching Captain Queeg, the man in position of responsibility and trust, break down under stress. As Psychiatrist Edward R. Miller explains it, this helped many patients to feel that "it could happen to anyone"-so they felt less different themselves. Also, they enjoyed the humbling of a "father-figure," for many had troubles that traced back to their own fathers or other authoritarian figures. Best of all, characters in the play were able to act out their hostility to Father-Figure Queeg without...
There were two parts in the Court Martial that no mental patient would play: those of Queeg himself and the judge advocate. They refused to play Queeg, explains Dr. Miller, because they feared that enacting a make-believe breakdown might cause a real breakdown: "They don't want to be identified with mental illness. They want to be normal." Neither would the patients tolerate a familiar, forbidding father-figure (such as Psychiatrist Miller himself) in the part of Queeg. Their choice fell on a "good father-figure": Chester Dowse, amiable chief of the hospital's special services department...
...spectators burst into applause when Queeg broke on the witness stand under the defense counsel's hammering. But this, Dr. Miller judged, was in appreciation of the fine performance. By and large, the audience sympathized deeply with the man who broke under stress...
...road company of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, starring loquacious Actor Paul Douglas as loquacious Captain Queeg, wound up its tour of the South seven weeks ahead of schedule. Reason: Mutiny Producer Paul Gregory feared "a big dip" at Dixie box offices because Philadelphia-born Douglas blabbed to a North Carolina reporter (TIME, Feb. 7) that the South "stinks" and is "a land of sowbelly and segregation...