Word: queeg
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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...
There is, however, quite enough technical magic in the famous episodes-the target incident that gives the first hint of Queeg's queerness, the dye-marker affair that sicklies him o'er with a yellow stain of panic. These scenes, for all their episodic quality, cling together like the well-machined surfaces they...
...leaves something to be desired. The buildup is too rapid, the characters are too little drawn out by the suction of suspense that is too soon released. Nevertheless, the scene is charged with drama, effectively paced by Director Edward (The Juggler) Dmytryk, and well played. The massive closeup of Queeg in disintegration is almost as pitiful and terrifying as it was meant...
...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...