The character:	Barney Greenwald
The actor:	Jose Ferrer
The movie:	The Caine Mutiny (1954)

In December 2018, a man who “attempted to spark an open discussion” on Twitter asked something very important. Sadiq posed the question, “Why do we bash ‘dead-beat’ dads for not being there for their kids but we never question if the child has bad vibes? Or if they’re just unpleasant to be around?”

Basically, that is the plot of The Caine Mutiny if you replace the word “dads” with “crews” and any synonym for “child” with “Captain Queeg.” It sounds like a diminution of the film, which is at least well-remembered even if I don’t think most people laud it as highly as I do. (Offhand, I’d call it one of the best 100 or so movies of the 1950s regardless of national origin.) Depending on whether your tastes lean more towards Shakespeare or HBO miniseries, “band of brothers” implies a bunch of guys on land doing the fighting. In the naval dramas, it’s more like the boys in the band than it is a band of brothers. The relationships are less idealized but far more important in the day-to-day, and the intensity of male feelings in these pictures ratchet up due to barely hidden eroticism, profound frustration, or hero worship: Billy Budd, The Bounty, and Mister Roberts, to name three famous ones. The Caine Mutiny fits this middle category, which is not not the first category either. The rebellion against an authority who is all-powerful in practice reverberates with the tension of the father-son relationship as Freud might have interpreted it. Deadbeat crews and captains with bad vibes.

Lieutenant Greenwald is a lawyer handling a defense case which, in some way, means that he has to be a disinterested observer. His job in the courtroom is to be the most interested actor on behalf of Maryk, but outside of it, it is his goal to be as emotionally distant from the events on the Caine as he was physically distant from them during the time they happened. In both fashions, Greenwald excels. Jose Ferrer, one of those brilliant people who grew up to be an actor but probably would have been a success in whatever other field he chose, channels the Princeton background, the intellectual savor of language that befits the man who has defined the Anglophone Cyrano for seventy-five years now. It’s difficult to imagine him as having much in common with Van Johnson or Fred MacMurray anyway, but knowing that he did not see the strawberry incident, for example, we know that he is all the way removed from the lived experience of the crew of the Caine.

If you believe that everyone is entitled to counsel, as I think most of us do, then there’s a certain kind of heroism in Greenwald no matter what. He knows that the case against Maryk is hopeless, given that the XO had the captain arrested and taken off the bridge and that no one denies that sequence of events. Yet his client, who sort of looks like a sunburned chicken nugget and who has a similarly squishy backbone, deserves someone to argue the case for him. But the heroism of Greenwald, as it must be for defense lawyers, is in recognizing that it is right for him to defend a guilty man and that it is wrong for him to watch an innocent one struck down. He recognizes that he has limited recourse to change the injustice which has occurred. And so he does what he can as a defense lawyer, an officer and a gentleman, and a guy who has gotten himself roundly drunk to fight the feelings. He confronts the real villain of the story, gives him a piece of his mind, and offers to go to blows with him in the parking lot. More on that later.