Sunday, January 16, 2011

We watched THE CAINE MUTINY after the Zip disc had been sitting around the house for more than a week. It took a while before Lisa and Hunter were willing to give it a shot.

I had entirely forgotten the tedious and irrelevant love story -- a subplot so irrelevant I think you could easily cut every last scene involving Ensign Keith ashore, with the possible exception of the dock scenes, and you'd have a tighter and stronger movie with nothing missing.

If I didn't know the movie was based on a Herman Wouk novel, I would have assumed that the Mae Wynn romance had been shoehorned into the movie because "women won't see a Navy movie if there isn't a love story" or something like that. In fact Lisa was just as itchy throughout those scenes as I was.

In the future, when everything is downloadable content, maybe we'll have options to watch re-edits of our movies. We can watch the Phantom Edit of THE PHANTOM MENACE, and THE CAINE MUTINY as a clean Navy story with no jaunts to Yosemite, and the full length cut of 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT COMMANDMENTS.

The movie's worth watching really for two performances: Bogart as Philip Francis Queeg, especially on the witness stand, and José Ferrer's explosion after the trial. Fred MacMurray turns in a crafty performance as the ship's comms officer. At first when you find out he's a novelist, you think, Oh, great, another stand-in for the author. Then it turns out that's not what he is.

Labels: watching movies

9:09 PM

2 Comments:

The one I'd want to see is the 90-minute Merian C Cooper cut of Peter Jackson's KING KONG.

By  Stephen Gallagher, at 5:56 AM  

Yeah, someone explain to me why they found an island full of apes and dinosaurs -- and brought back an ape?

By  Alex Epstein, at 8:00 AM  

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