The celebrated adaptation of Herman Wouk's novel about a supposed mutiny aboard an American minesweeper, and the subsequent court-martial, is memorable for Humphrey Bogart's quirky rendition of the paranoiac Captain Queeg, a strict disciplinarian who loses his cool and his ship under enemy fire. With Fred MacMurray as the reluctant lieutenant Keefer, and Jose Ferrer as the defense lawyer Greenwald who systematically strips Queeg of his mask of normality, the film truly hits its stride in the tautly directed courtroom scenes. A collaboration by two controversial figures from Hollywood's Cold War era--producer Stanley Kramer, who defended liberalism throughout the McCarthy years, and director Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten who then recanted--The Caine Mutiny also represents the uneasy pact such movies make in order to take on forbidden targets like the U.S. Navy, who complained that the story was both untrue and un-American, but whose cooperation Kramer needed to complete the shooting. Perhaps the ambiguous villain Keefer, whose intellectualism and anti-militarism smacked of left-wing sympathies, diverting attention from the film's bitter exposé of the pressures of military life, saved the day not only for the officer on trial (Van Johnson), but for the film itself.