About Last Night

In today’s Wall Street Journal I write about the 1955 TV version of Charles Laughton’s stage version of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, starring Lloyd Nolan as Queeg. Here’s an excerpt.

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Great stage performances and productions are the sand castles of art. Unless they should happen to be filmed, it is their destiny to be washed away by the high tides of time, living on only in the fallible memories of those lucky enough to have seen them in person. Back in the ’50s, though, a handful of major Broadway stage shows were later performed in studios for live broadcast on network TV. Some of these telecasts were preserved on film and survive in museum archives and the vaults of collectors, and if you know where to go, you can obtain DVD copies of a few of them….

I recently tracked down a copy of one of the most important of these telecasts, the 1955 “Ford Star Jubilee” TV version of “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” a 1954 play by Herman Wouk based on the climactic episode from his Pulitzer-winning 1951 novel about life on a minesweeper in World War II. In “The Caine Mutiny,” the captain of the U.S.S. Caine is Philip Francis Queeg, a mediocre Regular Navy officer who cracks under the life-threatening strain of a typhoon and is relieved from duty by Stephen Maryk, his executive officer, who believes Captain Queeg to be mentally ill.

The play, which portrays Maryk’s court-martial for mutiny, centers on the cross-examination of Queeg by Barney Greenwald, counsel for the defense. It was a hit on Broadway, running for 415 performances, and Lloyd Nolan, a B-movie semi-star who played Queeg, received hats-off raves from every critic in town. When he died in 1985, all of the obits led with his performance as Queeg. But Nolan was passed over for the 1954 film version, in which Humphrey Bogart played Queeg, and it is Bogart’s Queeg that is remembered today, with Nolan’s relegated to the small print of theatrical history.

“Ford Star Jubilee” was a monthly series of “special events” aired by CBS that is mainly known for its final episode, the first TV showing of “The Wizard of Oz.” But the “Ford Star Jubilee” version of “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” is far more significant, not only because it preserves Nolan’s performance but because it is a faithful record of the Broadway production, which was staged by Charles Laughton, who took up directing when his film career went into decline and immediately proved himself to be one of the most creative directors of the ’50s….

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Read the whole thing here.

To order a DVD-R of this telecast, call 800-444-2960 or go to robertsvideos.com.

The opening of the Ford Star Jubilee telecast of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial:

“Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble,’ and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear.”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Courage is a moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times by the power of the will.”

Charles Wilson (Lord Moran), The Anatomy of Courage

Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic perform the first movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony in concert in 1978:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., speech, October 26, 1967

From 2010:

I watched Napoleon Dynamite last night for the first time since its original release, and was pleased to see that it holds up exceptionally well….

Read the whole thing here.

“There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.”

George Eliot, Adam Bede

Fred Allen and Oscar Levant star in “The Ransom of Red Chief,” a 1952 dramatization of O. Henry’s short story that was released as part of an anthology film called O. Henry’s Full House. The segment was directed by Howard Hawks and is introduced by John Steinbeck:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)