He enlisted in the US naval reserve in 1942, and served in the Pacific aboard destroyer-minesweepers. When the US entered the second world war, Wouk briefly produced radio programmes for the treasury department, selling war bonds. After graduating he worked as a radio scriptwriter, and from 1936 until 1941 wrote jokes and sketches for the radio comedian Fred Allen. Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutinyīorn in New York to Esther (nee Levine) and Abraham Wouk, both Russian immigrants who had settled in the Bronx, Herman read Mark Twain as a boy and went to Columbia University, where he edited the humorous Columbia Jester and studied comparative literature and philosophy. It was one of the last moments when such a novel might have been written without apology, and published without embarrassment.
His novel Marjorie Morningstar (1955) ended with the renunciation of worldly ambition by a New York Jewish girl, and with an affirmation of marriage, suburbia, family and duty. He was an orthodox Jew, a Republican, a patriot and a sharp critic of assimilation. His conservative social and political attitudes and religious faith made him an atypical figure in American Jewish life after the second world war. Dmytryk, Bogart and Ferrer had all come to the attention of the House Un-American Activities committee, seeking out political subversion, and Wouk’s story provided impeccable conservative cover for them. Greenwald’s speech made vivid theatre when Wouk’s stage play, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, opened in New York in 1954, with Henry Fonda playing Greenwald. It was the regulars like Queeg, “standing guard on this fat, dumb and happy country of ours”, who saved Greenwald’s mother, a “little gray-headed Jewish lady”, from being melted down into a bar of soap. Greenwald’s drunken speech in praise of Queeg and disdain for Lt Keefer (Fred MacMurray), who had encouraged Maryk and Keith, gave a moral victory to career navy men. But the last scene, the celebration dinner for the acquitted defendants Maryk and Keith, accused of mutiny through relieving Queeg of his command when the minesweeper USS Caine was at risk of sinking during a typhoon, brought a different meaning to the story.
The interrogation scene, with Bogart twisting ball bearings in his hand while breaking down under the questioning of the defence attorney Lt Barney Greenwald (José Ferrer), would have made a powerful end to the film. In the role of the paranoid Captain Queeg, Humphrey Bogart gave one of his most mesmerising performances. The Caine Mutiny (1951), awarded the Pulitzer prize for fiction, was made into a popular movie by Edward Dmytryk in 1954.
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