WWII Marathon #12: The Caine Mutiny (1954)

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This unavoidably compelling naval drama, based on Herman Wouk's 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, is a classic mutiny story construct - first-half sea-voyage conflict, second-half courtroom drama - that inevitably surprises with its ambiguous lack of answers and questionable motives.
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The film, apparently at a quicker gape than the novel, tells of the mutinous acts on board the USS Caine in the Pacific, in which a small party of officers, led by Lieutenant Steve Maryk (Van Johnson), took over the ship from the highly enigmatic Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart).
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Like the classic (and innumerably filmed) Mutiny on the Bounty, the film discusses the ethics and morals behind the mutiny at sea and what is or isn't considered a treasonous act, though to its credit it doesn't blatantly vilify Bogart's Queeg, nor does it condone the acts of the mutinous party. 
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The majority of the cast is spot-on, with Bogart's confused, paranoid Queeg toeing the line between outright lunacy and just isolated neuroticism. Fred MacMurray turns in perhaps the most tricky role as the cowardly Lieutenant Tom Keefer. 
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Troublingly for this film adaptation, the story is framed around Ensign Willie Kieth (Robert Francis), a straight-laced, clean-cut Princeton boy whose brief service record and inexperience works against him as an officer on-board the Caine. Francis plays him like a shell-shocked bore and briefly (not not extensively) the film threatens to take on his demeanor. [B-]