Word: queeg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mutiny's heaviest handicap is built right into its biggest box-office advantage: the fame of the book the movie was made from. Since a large portion of the public has studied the case of Captain Queeg right down to the last notorious strawberry, the moviemakers may have felt obligated to reproduce the main details of the case precisely as the public remembered them. As a result, the camera spends so much time swallowing evidential strawberries that it hardly has time to note that a war is going on, or that real people are involved...
...above all, for a kind of instinctive communion with the camera that comes partly from inner fiber, partly from vicissitude and long practice. Few possess these attributes in such full measure as that seamy, balding and corrosively sardonic old professional, Humphrey DeForest Bogart, soon to be seen as Captain Queeg in Stanley Kramer's heralded Technicolor version of The Caine Mutiny...
...Another veteran cinemactor, 50-year-old Lloyd Nolan, will have a share of that immortality. As the Queeg of Author Wouk's incisive The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, now playing S.R.O. on Broadway, Nolan gives a comparably brilliant performance, last week was voted "best actor" of the 1953-54 season in Variety's annual poll of Manhattan drama critics...
There is much, beyond the pulse of the story, to enhance the court-martial setup. The charge against Maryk of seizing com mand during a typhoon on the ground that Queeg was mentally ill - is an un hackneyed one. Again, Maryk's lawyer, Lieut. Barney Greenwald, would far rather be prosecuting than defending his client - and indeed wins him an acquittal by not defending him. Instead, he attacks others: first he twists a fatuous psychiatrist's tail, then twists the knife in an emotionally frayed and rattled Queeg. And there is the final celebration scene, a sort...
...most vivid conflicts in the play are self-conflicts: Queeg's agonized attempts to keep a grip on his emotions, Greenwald's rigid determination to put a hood over his conscience. As Queeg, Lloyd Nolan plays brilliantly, is as self-revealing when still in control as when losing control. Henry Fonda's sober courtroom Greenwald is in fine contrast both to Queeg and to Greenwald drunk. The whole cast, from John Hodiak's Maryk on, is admirable: out of the stylized nature of the court-martial has been forged just the right style for a theater...