The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial review – William Friedkin’s final film looks for the truth

he ghosts of film history can be seen all over Venice, the city where Dirk Bogarde sat down in a deck-chair and died and Donald Sutherland was bewitched by the sight of a red raincoat. One spies their faces on black-and-white stills inside the main festival site and adorning celebratory posters positioned around town. They occasionally crop up on the movie schedule as well.

Taking its lead from the old Herman Wouk novel , and the play that Wouk himself wrote, Friedkin’s picture rakes the coals of a crisis aboard the USS Caine, a mine-sweeper tasked with patrolling the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. A cyclone hit and the ship was rolled. Commander Queeg ordered the Caine to go south to escape the high winds. Lieutenant Mark relieved him of his command and steered it north instead.

Was this a mutiny, or had Queeg grown unsound? Reddick, presiding over the hearing, sits behind his desk with a frowning concentration as various witnesses are brought in to testify. “My version is the complete truth,” insists Queeg and initially his story holds water. But there is a top-note of peevishness to his voice and he has a disconcerting habit of nervously crossing and re-crossing his thumbs.

Midway through the proceedings, we’re naturally anticipating a clarifying flashback, showing the crisis in the wheelhouse and perhaps the events that sparked it: some roiling, rain-spattered set-piece to break the metronomic rhythm of the court-martial hearings and definitively show us what occurred on the Caine. But that’s not the point; the film’s interest lies elsewhere. Truth, Friedkin tells us, is subjective and partial.

In the drama’s second half, Queeg is recalled. His crew-members have sworn that he’s hot-headed, paranoid. Now, belatedly, he starts to show it. He’s asked if it’s true that he once banned drinking water for two days in a dust storm, and conducted a 36-hour inquiry to find out who broke his coffee maker. The man is angry, flailing, beating back over past grievances - and yet even here, at Queeg’s greatest moment of weakness, Friedkin’s even-handed drama isn’t about to cut him loose.

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