Word: queeg
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Paranoia in a different shape turns up in The Caine Mutiny, a Dudley House offering at Lehman Hall. Humphrey Bogart plays the psychotic Captain Queeg, a petty tyrant with some strange habits. When you've seen the movie, you'll understand why at the end of Watergate top level aides were comparing Nixon to the ball-bearing-rolling skipper...
...columns in the New Republic. They demonstrate once again how perceptive Osborne was in sensing ahead of the rest of the press that the President was politically doomed and that Nixon's psychological stability was doubtful. Osborne's most memorable material is a discussion of the almost Queeg-like attention to petty detail that characterized Nixon's White House work habits long before Watergate. (He ordered log books to be kept on which White House paintings drew praise from visitors, and spent hours poring over inventories of the hundreds of cuff links, ashtrays and copies...
...Cabinet members came away with two strong convictions: Nixon wanted them to carry on with their jobs, and he was not about to quit. But if he seemed politically naive about his desperate situation, Nixon showed no signs of emotional instability. There were no "Captain Queeg" mannerisms. Saxbe recalled later. "We were all looklooking for something like that. He was calm, in control of himself, and not the least bit tense...
...read the transcripts; now see the movie. So goes the current parlor game, "Watergate, Soon to Be Made into a Major Motion Picture." Most casting choices tend to be inspired but impractical - President Nixon played by the shade of a Captain Queeg-ish Humphrey Bogart (they were all "dishloyal officersh"), or Jeb Magruder impersonated by the late Montgomery Clift. Properly, the ground rules should exclude all but those actors available for two months of work, plus a renewable option for the TV-series spinoff. Let those who are without guilt stone the first cast...
...relented, named names, and returned to a soulless, lucrative Hollywood career. He directed this film of the Herman Wouk bestseller, produced by the indefatigable Stanley Kramer, and it ends up as an Eisenhower-culture fantasy; the Jewish lawyer gets to ask, in the final moments. Where all of Captain Queeg's mutinous underlings were when Queeg was fighting--right from WWII's beginning--to prevent his grandmother from being turned into a soap-bar. Bogart is Queeg, the psychotic captain of the U.S.S. Caine, and he's fine: it's fun to watch Fred MacMurray and Van Johnson flounder...