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The Caine Mutiny is a fantastic movie, it's been on the cable channels recently, and it's worth watching again and again. Bogie was incredible in that part. Some parts of the film are flawed, like Robert Francis' flat acting, and the treacley love scenes, but that movie made me aware of Jose Ferrer, who is excellent.

It's like Mr. Roberts, one of my all time favorite movies. They just don't write them like that anymore. Sure, there's more freedom to have more realistic language and behavior (the rowdy shore leave scenes alone would be a nirvanah for today's directors), but they have things modern movies rarely have: a morality.

I agree with you in every particular that you mentioned, but I'd be a bit worried that rowdy shore-leave sequences might be allowed to dominate over the more serious parts of the narrative in a modern re-make. Although there was a short lag-phase before the screen caught up with the White House tapes, I think Nixon (more than Lenny Bruce) can take a bow for having brought a measure of realism to 'big screen' dialogue. The lag-phase was occasioned by the need for Nixon's enemies to express their horror at such language. There were times when I wondered if Woodward, Bernstein, and their fellow newspaper men had to engage in more 'investigative journalism' to determine the meanings of those 'expletive deleteds'. Interestingly, I think W&B did not use the term Deep Throat in any of their original Washington Post articles to describe the 2IC at the FBI (Mark Felt) who was the source of most/all of their reliable information. That description, better suited to Slick Willy's presidency, may not have been used until the book and/or film of All The President's Men as best I can recall. What timid times those were in respect to public acknowledgement of the character of private language!

"freedom"

You too have obviously noticed that with all the so-called "freedom" filmmakers have today, their works are mostly stunted, shallow, and juvenile. Working within imposed restrictions, like supposedly what was regnant before the sixties, produced far better films than todays throwaway junk flicks. Old moviemakers had to rely on good plots and character development rather than profanity, nudity, and special effects. Again the old rule applies: because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it.