Word: queeg
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...middle-brow audience, TV served up a go-minute helping of Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, with most of the same cast that has carried the show to big-money grosses on Broadway and on tour across the nation. Lloyd Nolan re-created his memorable Captain Queeg, depicting the collapse of a personality, in one shattering crossexamination, from a man-to-man blaster to a whining paranoiac. Captain Queeg's character is complex yet dramatically clear, but most of the other characters in Caine Mutiny must operate as intellectual phobias or fantasies of the author. Barry...
...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...
...Wouk is not an angry man. But there is more than artless optimism or patriotism beneath the surface of his stories. Wouk denies taking stands for or against anything, but the evidence of the books contradicts him. There is an indictment in The Caine Mutiny-not, ultimately, of Queeg, the maniacal martinet, but of Keefer, the phony intellectual. There is an indictment in Marjorie Morningstar-of Noel Airman, the restless Bohemian...
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...