In my experience, film memories are generally sharper than book memories. Film images crowd out the words. An exception is The Caine Mutiny. I remembered the novel very well, and I was astonished that the film version, which I saw last night and must have seen in 1954 or thereabouts, had almost completely evaporated from my increasingly porous mind. I thought that I remembered something in black-and-white, but this film is in very bright colors.
Perhaps my memory faded because the movie can't hold a candle to the novel.
Some of my many reservations: a) the actors are just too darn old. The novel is about young men, dislocated in early maturity, coming to terms with harsh new experiences. But the sailors who are supposed to be in their early twenties were played by Van Johnson (38), Fred MacMurray (46), and Jose Ferrer (45). Captain Queeg, who should be about thirty years old, was Humphrey Bogart, who was 55 and looked it, and who had, in fact, been wounded in World War I. The casting completely compromises the story and skews naive into conspiratorial. Robert Francis, who played Willis Seward Keith, was in fact twenty-four; because he's so much younger than his shipmates, he looks more like their mascot than their contemporary. B) the romance between Keith and May Wynn (Marie Minotti in the novel), which is marginal or decorative rather than intrinsic in the novel, occupies far too much time in the film, and considerably dilutes the tension. C) the ship model that’s used in the typhoon scene was ludicrously inadequate. D) the ethnic tensions that are a source of complexity in the novel are elided: May Wynn is no longer an Italian Catholic, so it’s impossible to understand exactly why Keith vacillates about marrying her; Barney Greenwald (the defense lawyer) is no longer Jewish. Simpler, in this case, is not better.
It seems that the U. S. Navy wouldn’t cooperate with the project until the writers made certain changes in the script. It would be fascinating to learn how much of the film was censored, and for what reasons.
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