Is Captain Queeg just a perfectionist or actually paranoid? this is a story about the trial of the mutineers who opted for the second of those choices, and took command of the ship from him.

This is one of those movies that Mr. Otter likes to watch every so often, and I watch it with him just for Bogart's fine and complex performance. There's a lot of extraneous stuff added, about Ensign Keith's mom and girlfriend and stuff, that really shouldn't be there...the focus of the movie should just be the guys at sea and the trial...but I guess they thought nobody would come to see a movie about that.

I think they were wrong, but nobody hires me to make movies, as Mr. Otter so often points out.

The whole sequence of events from when Ensign Keith (Robert Francis) joins his first ship, which is soon put under Queeg's command, to the typhoon in which he is actually relieved of command and the court martial that follows, is fascinating and well done. And of course Bogie is absolutely brilliant, wavering from just a little odd to full blown wacko and back through the whole movie. Absolutely riveting, a truly masterful portrayal.

Fred MacMurray is here as the intellectual who says a lot of stuff but when the chips are down covers his ass, and Claude Akins and Lee Marvin are a couple of the sailors, lots of fun to watch, and Van Johnson as a young lieutenant, a good solid cast. (Mr Otter constantly whines that every guy in the movie is ten years too old for the part, but I don't listen to him.)

The only thing that doesn't work for me is the lawyer's speech at the end: it totally undermines the point of the film, which was the final explosive ending of the trial. The lawyer's diatribe puts that in doubt, makes it sound like the sailors pulled a fast one on the court and did Queeg (and thus America's Military) a huge wrong...evidently the movie was made with the cooperation of the US Navy, and this was one of the things they insisted on to make sure that their image didn't suffer. That and the notice at the beginning of the movie that there has never been a mutiny in the US Navy and that these events are hypothetical...

But it really is good. Go rent it and enjoy it.