Here’s the trailer for William Friedkin’s final film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
After premiering out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, Friedkin’s final film, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, will air next month on Showtime
Aux News William Friedkin
Two months after the director’s death, William Friedkin’s final film will have its day in court. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, the last movie directed by Friedkin, will debut on Paramount+ and Showtime in early October.
Based on the 1954 play by Herman Wouk, who adapted it for the stage from his 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the movie follows court-martialed Lt. Steve Maryk (Jake Lacey), who stands accused of mutiny after relieving his mentally unstable commanding officer, Lt. Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland), of duty. But the trailer is teeming with actors putting on a clinic. In addition to Lacey and Sutherland, Patrick Clarke, still in Oppenheimer mode, turns up as Barney Greenwald, Maryk’s skeptical defense attorney, and the late Lance Reddick in one of his final screen roles.
“The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial is a film that I have long awaited to make, originally written by one of the masters of his time, Herman Wouk. I knew that I wanted to create a highly tense, pressurized scenario which would move rapidly along like a bat out of hell,” he wrote in his Venice Film Festival director’s statement. “I intentionally chose to keep the issue of right and wrong as ambiguous as possible. I was consistently impressed with the level of expertise that our actors brought to their roles and I believe that these are some of the best performances I have ever seen.”
Production on The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial began in January 2023. At the film’s Venice Film Festival premiere, held a month after Friedkin’s August 7th death, producer Annabelle Dunne revealed the “state secret” that Guillermo Del Toro served as a contractually-mandated back-up director for Friedkin due to his age because “Hollywood is ageist.” Dunn recalled raising the issue with Friedkin, who told her he needed to consider it. The next day, Friedkin called her and said, “Ok, honey, I have the guy. Get a pen: It’s Guillermo Del Toro, you got that?” Del Toro, busy promoting his Oscar-winning Pinocchio at the time, told Dunne, “I am going to come to set every single day and sit next to you.”
“It was a joy for all of us, including the actors, to have his presence there,” she said. “He made it abundantly clear it was Billy’s movie. He said he was our mascot.”
Following Friedkin’s death, Del Toro wrote of his experience on set with Friedkin and how masterfully he worked. The production was short on time, so Friedkin expected everyone to be off-book by the time cameras rolled. Friedkin, del Toro says, “rarely did more than one” take, but when an actor hit a bump in a long monologue, “the set grew tense.” Friedkin, known for his temper, calmed the actor and got things back on track.
“The business tends to enthrone the rough and blustery gestures, but here we had a master – one loved by cast and crew, knowingly and wisely turning a checkmate into a victory solely with gentle empathy: he knew,” del Toro wrote. “Great men are rare. Good men are even more so. I am grateful to have met Billy and to have shared many an evening with him and Sherry and my Kim. He has barely left, and I already miss him horribly.”
William Friedkin’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will stream on Showtime and Paramount+ on October 6 and air on Showtime on October 8.
16 Comments
Other title considered: A Few Good Old Men.
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE EARLY BIRD SPECIAL!
Now I want to see Guillermo del Toro’s totally creepy Caine Mutiny Cout-Martial with stop-motion puppets.Also, I’m pretty sure Queeg is a lieutenant commander, not just a lieutenant. The two-and-a-half stripes on Kiefer’s sleeve and all that.
Yeah, I’m not sure you can mutiny against a Lieutenant. And if you did, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
The Navy would probably disagree with that “wouldn’t be that big of a deal” part.
Good cast, but the trailer comes off as Court-Martial Tropes: The Movie.
This looks…*fine*, I guess. /shrugsBut my forefront feeling is: godDAMN, I hope this is good; I really miss Lance Reddick.
Robert Altman directed a TV movie adaptation in 1988, starring Jeff Daniels. That one’s pretty good.
The Bogart Caine Mutiny is a near perfect film with a near perfect cast. Jose Ferrer and a slippery Fred MacMurray particularly stand out for me.I don’t care for remakes. Particularly ones of already great films.
You must be fun at plays
Not Boebert fun but I do okay.
This isn’t a remake of the Bogart film. In 1951, Herman Wouk wrote a book called The Caine Mutiny, which, in 1954, was adapted into a film by Columbia Pictures also called The Caine Mutiny, starring Humphrey Bogart. But the previous year, 1953, Wouk himself had adapted the book into a stage play called The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. This play only dramatised the court-martial portion of the book. This film is an adaptation of that play, but it updates the setting from WWII to a modern one.It was previously adapted in the 80s as a TV movie starring Jeff Daniels which is pretty good.
I can accept a remake of a great film if it gets an important work back in front of audiences that won’t bother with old films.
Wouk adapted book for the stage. I think the film is based more on the stage play as the new movie takes place almost entirely in the courtroom and it’s surroundings. There will be leadups and none of the flashbacks to the events that happened like in the original movie. In other words no exhaustive search for strawberries on the ship although from what I read its actually a search for who broke a coffee maker. I guess that is considered more up to date.
When did Jason Clarke change his name to Patrick?
Annabelle Dunne changes her name twice in the space of a paragraph apparently.