The Caine Mutiny [DVD] [1954]

If the switch to DVD has accomplished nothing else, it's forced the studios to do new transfers from upgraded sources of their classic films. Nowhere is this more to be appreciated than with Edward Dmytryk's The Caine Mutiny. The movie went through a couple of laserdisc editions that never looked half as good as the film-to-video transfer used for the DVD. And anyone who grew up watching the relatively faded, flat presentations of The Caine Mutiny on television will be amazed by the color in the opening credits, the beautiful flesh tones in the nightclub scene near the beginning of the movie, and the sharpness of the skin textures everywhere. The film was released in 1954, a year into the advent of the era of widescreen movies, and although it wasn't shot with anamorphic lenses, it was intended to be shown in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, which is how it is offered on one side of this disc. A comparison between the full-screen and letterboxed versions leads one to favor the latter -- the framing on the full-screen film is too tight throughout and misses the subtleties of camera movement (especially in the climactic trial scene) that the director was aiming for. The movie has been treated well, with 28 chapters that mark out all of the highlights. The menu pops up automatically on start-up, and the disc comes with the trailer from The Caine Mutiny and also, for unexplained reasons, one from another Bogart movie, Dead Reckoning, which has never surfaced on DVD (though one wishes it would). The trailer for The Caine Mutiny is fascinating as a document of the impact of the original novel by Herman Wouk; in its time, it was one of the biggest-selling novels of the 20th century -- rivaling Gone With the Wind -- and the trailer was able to mention specific scenes from the novel with the confidence that most filmgoers would know exactly what it was referring to. The insert that comes with the disc purports to tell the background on the movie, but it really doesn't; there were behind-the-scenes studio machinations on The Caine Mutiny that had a lot to do with making it as profitable as it was, and it also bailed Columbia Pictures out of a losing contract with producer Stanley Kramer, none of which is mentioned. Those omissions, however, detract not at all from the film itself, which hasn't looked or sounded this good in decades.