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Reviews
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1988)
faithfully prosaic
Overall, this is an entertaining, if not instructive, rendition of what Wouk got onto paper. It's well worth watching for everyone who loved Wouk's novel. The richness of what he wrote has led us to the world of private imagination, and films can seldom satisfy the complexity here. The problem seems to be miscasting in several directions. One is expecting a little more gray and perhaps a bit more subtlety in Davis's performance of the paranoid Queeg; this constant rolling of steel balls is probably overdone. That is to say, perhaps, there is only one Bogart, but there is a certain plausibility missing here. Bogosian makes a capable Greenwald, but once more, there is no solid grounding here of a wounded flier -- and so we also have a puny Keifer and a Maryk without the hue of seamanship. The callow Willie, however, fits the bill, as does Ken Michels as Dr. Bird, the smug psychiatrist. That, we found entertaining. We agree with the first reviewer that the director stepped on some lines with background noise, and we'll never understand why Greenwald had to fight to be heard at the party. In addition, everyone seems about the same age in this movie, like a fraternity costume party. Wouk's work has much to tell us about our own times. We'd like to see someone do this again, with a deeper commitment than what Robert Altman has provided.
Abraham Lincoln (1930)
Excellent costumes, make-up.
Walter Huston gives an overdrawn but somehow compelling picture of the mythological Lincoln, even if the movie, itself, seems cut out of a comic strip. I would give this movie some good marks for verisimilitude, if nothing else. There are some terrible lapses in history, some twisting, some stretching, but what does one expect in a movie? Honestly, the actors who play Stephen Douglas, Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee are not much more than one-dimensional, but they actually seem closer to reality than the plastic figures in Gods and Generals or Gettysburg. The director W. D. Griffith must have had some of the best makeup people on the planet. If that wasn't Stephen A. Douglass dancing with Mary Todd, then who was it? Griffith had something here, but compressing Lincoln's life into a few scenes was an impossible task to begin with. I like Huston's portrayal of Lincoln. I would watch it again, for that, and only that.