Word: queeg
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...Caine Mutiny as to suggest a shipboard drama of events through a courtroom drama of character. Charles Laughton has staged the production with a superbly unswerving sense of the whole. Building slowly, the play at length walls in, not the court-martialed Lieut. Maryk, but his accuser, Commander Queeg, skipper of the destroyer-minesweeper U.S.S. Caine...
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...
...savvy stay-at-home will quickly recognize the officers and crew of the destroyer Dreher as combat-fiction standbys, e.g., the captain, no Queeg of the Caine, but a man who wants a taut ship; the iron-man bosun, seagoing equivalent of the hard-boiled sergeant who chews nails and spits tacks; the gabby liar who peddles cheap moonshine about his adventures with women; the aloof, intellectual poetizer...
Prodded from astern by the Reserve Officers' Association, Hickey also disclaimed all credit for the suggestion that Annapolisman Queeg be made a reserve officer instead of a regular. "Our reserves,' he assured one & all, "are the backbone of the Navy...