ADAPTING RACE AND GENDER: SOUTH PACIFIC, MISTER ROBERTS AND THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL AS

3- 0)1

D f ? t f A l f t . B 5 4 , A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of The requirement for The degree

Master of Arts In Drama

by

Matty M. Bloom

San Francisco, California

May, 2011 Copyright by Matty M. Bloom 2011 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read ADAPTING RACE AND GENDER: SOUTH PACIFIC,

MISTER ROBERTS AND THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL by Matty M. Bloom, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree: Master of Arts in Drama at San Francisco State

University. ADAPTING RACE AND GENDER: SOUTH PACIFIC, MISTER ROBERTS AND THE CAINE MUTINY COURT-MARTIAL

Matty M. Bloom San Francisco, California 2011

This study traces the paradox of liberal and conservative tensions related to the 1950s cultures of triumphalism and the Cold War through the lenses of race and gender in three post-World War II Broadway adaptations. Race is the lens of identity in the South

Pacific adaptation process analysis, which starts with the 1947 novel, Tales o f the South

Pacific, and includes the original 1949 Broadway musical, the 1958 Hollywood movie, and the 2008 Broadway revival. Gender is the lens in the adaptation process analysis of

Mister Roberts, which starts with the 1946 novel, Mister Roberts, and includes the original 1948 Broadway play and the 1955 Hollywood movie, both by the same name as the novel. Gender is also the window in the The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial adaptation process analysis, which starts with the 1951 novel, The Caine Mutiny, and includes the

1954 original Broadway play, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial', the 1954 Hollywood movie, The Caine Mutiny; and the 1988 made-for-television adaptation by Robert

Altman, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This thesis is dedicated to my beloved husband, David Klausner, whose ongoing support has made this degree possible. It is also dedicated to his family for whom the effects of World War II were profound. Additionally, it is dedicated in loving memory to my father, Herbert Charles Bloom, Battalion Intelligence Officer, S2, specializing in

Photo Intelligence. He was stationed in Darmstadt, Germany, with the 3rd Army Corps

Headquarters of the 7 th Army, in G2 Intelligence under Colonel Langevin. I am also greatly indebted to my advisor, Dr. Lawrence Eilenberg, for teaching me so much about the world of theater and mentoring me through this thesis. I also appreciate other SFSU

Theater Arts faculty members for enriching the world of theater for me.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction:...... 1

Chapter 1: South Pacific

I: Background...... 20

II: Descriptions of the novel and adaptations...... 25

III: Analysis of race...... 36

IV: Conclusions...... 75

Chapter 2: Mister Roberts

I: Background...... 80

II: Descriptions of the novel and adaptations...... 87

III: Analysis of gender...... 98

IV: Conclusions...... 128

Chapter 3: The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial

I: Background...... 131

II: Descriptions of the novel and adaptations...... 137

III: Analysis of gender...... 145

IV: Conclusions...... 171

Conclusions...... 174

Works Cited...... 183 1

Introduction

This study will examine three award-winning stage adaptations of the immediate post-World War II era: South Pacific (1949), Mister Roberts (1948), and The Caine

Mutiny Court-Martial (1951). All three Broadway plays were adapted from extremely popular1 novels and were later adapted from the stage to the screen. The lens of this analysis will be on one strong aspect of identity in each of the adaptation processes. Race is the primary subject of inquiry into the South Pacific process; gender is the subject of inquiry in the processes of Mister Roberts and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial.

The triumphalism of American victory in World War II and the immediately ensuing Cold War jointly affected American culture in contradictory ways. In David

Halberstam’s compelling thesis, the notion of the 1950s as a staid, orderly, conservative era in American culture with a minimum social dissent also contains the paradox that social ferment was beginning just below this placid surface (Preface ix). This study contends that these three postwar adaptation processes, with the stage as their cornerstone, represent the paradox of the fifties, and suggest a complex mix of midcentury liberal and conservative forces. By affirming conformity while simultaneously showing individualistic rebellion brewing against it, these three

1 The term “popular” is used in this study to refer to an artifact with a wide audience, rather than as a genre or as a pejorative description. 2

adaptation processes reveal the fifties’ paradox, with Halberstam’s thesis as a critical underpinning.

This study further contends that at the same time, while revealing the complex paradox of the fifties, as these adaptations move into that decade from their respective novels as their source materials, they also mostly become more conservative. Related to the paradox of the fifties, this increasing conservativism can be seen in the higher stakes in race and gender represented on the stage and film. This study therefore also addresses how, through identity, these representations of culture are mediated by the exigencies of form, or by what is inherently required of each of the different types of adaptation.

Terms used often in the study, like race, gender and gender coding, masculinity and hyper-masculinity, and liberal and conservative, are defined and contextualized below in this Introduction. Other terms will be defined as they are used in the chapters.

The legendarily successful 1949 Broadway musical, South , directed by

Joshua Logan, had music written by Richard Rodgers, and its book and lyrics by Oscar

Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan. The musical, which places the war as background for encounters between Americans and Pacific Islanders, is still produced at a rate of 450 stage productions per year worldwide. Yet, the highly acclaimed 2008 Lincoln Center production was the first Broadway revival in over sixty years. The chapter on South

Pacific will address the following adaptation trajectory: its 1947 source novel, Tales o f the South Pacific; the 1949 musical script and original Broadway production; the 1951

London Drury Lane production’s black-and-white dress rehearsal film, which is the only 3

extant film related to the original Broadway production; the 1958 Hollywood movie; and the live performance of the 2008 Broadway revival at Lincoln Center. In addition to the contention of the fifties’ paradox and an increasingly conservative representation of race, the trajectory examined here also argues that the 2008 revival seems to expose the prior conservativism regarding race, while adding a curious new feature that is not particularly liberal. The revival also inspires questions about its timing and success at this American moment.

The smash 1948 Broadway hit, Mister Roberts, written by Thomas Heggen and

Joshua Logan, is based on Heggen’s highly successful, tragicomic 1946 novel by the same name. The novel and play are about an officer on a Navy cargo ship in the Pacific towards the war’s end and his conflict with his Captain. The novel and play were adapted as the hit 1955 Hollywood movie also called Mister Roberts, all three of which will be examined in this chapter. Together, the three forms constitute the first of the highly successful, lucrative, immediate post-World War II adaptation groupings. The story was again adapted in 1984 as a videotape of a live studio performance by the same name that will not be discussed, as it was not remarkable, and there are no major reviews of it. Additionally, the 1965 television series by the same name will not be included in the analysis since it lasted for only one season with low ratings. However, unlike South

Pacific and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Mister Roberts has not had a major revival on Broadway. Its most recent significant production was the 2005 revival in Washington

D.C. at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Since this is not a 4

Broadway revival, it will not be analyzed, although it will be briefly addressed. This examination will map the path of gender coding as meaning from the novel Mister

Roberts to the Broadway play and the Hollywood movie as a reflection the fifties’ paradox, revealing its trajectory of amplified conservativism.

Herman Wouk adapted his play, the 1954 The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, from the courtroom segment of his 1951 novel, The Caine Mutiny: A Novel o f World War II, a coming-of-age story about a young lieutenant before and during his tenure on a World

War II naval destroyer-minesweeper. Like Mister Roberts, the context of conflict in the play, the novel, and the movie is between naval officers and their Captain. This chapter will look closely at how the play was adapted from the novel as well as how the play related to the 1954 Hollywood movie adaptation, called The Caine Mutiny. The original

1954 Broadway play was additionally adapted in 1955 as a live television production and a made-for-television film in 1988, directed by Robert Altman. The latter adaptation will be discussed because of Altman’s more contemporary approach to the material. This chapter contends that the play and even more so, Altman’s filmic adaptation, amplify the paradox of the 1950s that originated in the novel. But the Hollywood movie, based on the novel rather than the play, is more conservative than either one. The play has also been revived on Broadway in 2006, prompting questions about its timing and reception.

The immediate post-World War II era Broadway stage produced socially significant and popular plays that reached large audiences in New York and nationwide in traveling shows, despite the Cold War and McCarthy’s destructive machinations 5

against liberals in the arts. These Broadway productions also stimulated popular screen adaptations. For its time, the midcentury American musical was an extremely important and palatable vehicle for successfully delivering challenging and vital messages of liberalism or social reform. It sealed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s fame in the American musical’s so-called “Golden Age” that lasted through the fifties. Rodgers and

Hammerstein’s wartime Oklahoma! (1943) dealt with the topic of the Other set in an earlier period of American culture, as did their other works. But it also achieved milestone status as the break-through, fully integrated American musical that furthered the story and action through tight integration of book, lyrics, and score. This paved the way for Rodgers and Hammerstein in their postwar South Pacific to again cautiously make the point about the Other in relation to race. South Pacific was wildly successful at a time in America when courageous voices were needed “without ruffling feathers”

(Wertheim 270). In the context of this study, however, an examination of race in the

South Pacific adaptations shows increasing conservativism compared to its source material, and also illuminates the fifties’ paradox of contradictory liberal and conservative forces related to the Cold War and the postwar culture of triumph.

The American victory was accompanied by stability related to significant economic growth in the United States, but complex cultural consequences ensued. An example of the fifties’ paradox is related to African Americans. They had enlisted in the war at rates far higher than their proportions in the population where they were met with segregation and extensive prejudice, only to return home to the hypocrisy of Jim Crow, 6

the “separate but equal” policy still enforced in the South by law and by custom in the

North (Chafe 4, 17-19). As more than two million black Americans migrated from the rural South to northern and western industrial cities for work after the war, the civil rights movement ignited in political activism, such as The Little Rock Nine, the brave group that protested segregated education in 1957. This and many other acts of civil disobedience helped paved the way for The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most sweeping civil rights legislation in the twentieth century.

Scholars whose works are relevant to the analysis of cultural politics in the adaptation process of South Pacific will be used in that chapter. Geoffrey Block’s book on Richard Rodgers includes a close structural analysis of the musical along with general commentary on its cultural politics. Andrea Most’s book on Jewish cultural politics in relation to the Broadway musical includes relevant observations, as does James A.

Lovensheimer’s dissertation, which performs a detailed musical-dramatic analysis on the evolution of the musical script. David Roman and Zachary W olfs review of the musical, and Sheng-Mei Ma’s and Sheridan Prasso’s respective works on the cultural politics of

Asian and Asian-American women will also be used in this chapter.

Another critical underpinning of this study related to the conservative aspect of these adaptation processes has to do with the commercial aspect of the process, which was conceptualized by cultural historian Philip D. Beidler. He has persuasively contended that through iteration in the adaptation process, these popular novels and their popular stage and filmic adaptations commodified America’s role in World War II as 7

collective myth in the production of what he calls “American remembering” of “the Good

War’s greatest hits” (12). While it is obvious to most interested individuals that commercial concerns would be a major factor in midcentury Broadway and Hollywood adaptations, the close reading in this study looks at what specifically happens as the source material gets adapted to make these adaptations increasingly conservative.

This study also contends that as the role of the heroic soldier intensifies from page to stage to screen in all three adaptation processes, so does an underlying narrative of

America as the mythic agent of universal democratic justice. Such heroism, however, is also complex. When pursued by the individual, it becomes heroism of the “One,” which implies elitism; when it is pursued by the collective or group, it becomes the democratizing heroism of the “Ordinary Man.” Beidler’s conceptual framework also applies to the inquiries into The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial and Mister Roberts. For example, the commercialization of the war as a mythic representation of heroism is tied to the production of nostalgic masculinity as a lucratively popular aspect of Mister

Roberts. Theater scholar Albert Wertheim’s contention that these plays represent all­ male worlds largely “devoid of women, children, and parents” that “seem redolent of nostalgia for the male bonding of wartime,” also supports these close readings into the nature of the representations of masculinity and heroism in the adaptation processes

(226).

The war catalyzed huge changes in American society that drove social progress as well as reaction against it. Millions of veterans returned home to the pressures of 8

redefining manhood outside the victorious soldier context in the rapidly expanding prosperous postwar civilian economic boom. With the support of the GI Bill, veterans went to school and found new jobs, displacing women who had necessarily joined the wartime workforce in historic numbers and occupations. African America workers were often demoted and white males were sometimes pushed aside by returning veterans

(McConachie 6). With the postwar baby boom underway, as men strove to gain, maintain, or transcend access to the growing middle class by working in increasingly large industries and corporations, they also had to deal with the pressure to support families and climb the organizational ladder.

The widely read 1957 bestseller, The Organization Man, by journalist William H.

Whyte, Jr., criticizing corporate conformity, seems to attest to how the highly competitive economy of burgeoning postwar corporate capitalism fueled masculine anxieties. Social historian Michael Kimmel suggested that the postwar era was fraught with what he labels as the midcentury “cult of masculinity” or “compulsive masculinity,” or what might be more readily understood as “hyper-masculinity,” the term used in this study (93, 100).

“Hyper-masculinity” refers to toughness, extreme competitiveness, aggression and deep insecurity, along with problematic tension between individualism and conformity, values that are thematic in the warship dramas. Hyper-masculinity contains conflict and contradiction. Opposed to an ostensibly secure masculinity, or masculinity more broadly defined as related to the traditional gender distinction between male and female as 9

discussed below, hyper-masculinity is distinguished by being affirmed through a troubled heroic posture.

The postwar era’s masculine tensions between individuality and conformity reflect cultural pressure related to the Cold War in the United States. Scholars of the

Cold War refer to this as American “Cold War culture” or how the U.S. national policy of

“containment” towards communism and the Soviet Union affected American culture.

“Containment,” or U.S. policy aimed at holding back and enclosing communism, generated a wide array of activity, including espionage and covert warfare, extensive foreign aid to prevent communism’s spread, the arms and space races, sports competitions, and other cultural and economic entailments. These activities linked the armed services with the public through tax dollars, universities, corporations, and propaganda.

In Cold War scholar Bruce McConachie’s book, he gives persuasive examples of of containing the Other in the context of Cold War culture. These included social science discourse that, for example, encouraged blacks to view themselves as helpless victims, and whites to view black males, in particular, as disturbed and dangerous; the bunkered mentality of suburban flight; and the burgeoning all-white sit-coms that likewise represented cloistered suburbia along with the occasional black maid or gardener.

Additionally, McConachie said that Cold War changes caused changes in American theater, although he dated these changes as being from 1935 to 1950 (Preface x). This study contends these changes continued into the fifties and beyond since Wouk’s play 10

opened in 1951, and the movie adaptations of the three Broadway plays under discussion opened in the mid- to late fifties and were popular beyond that, particularly South Pacific.

Also, many historians now cite the ending of the Cold War as 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, along with the reunification of Germany. This more recent definition further illuminates more recent revivals.

As represented in these warship novels and their adaptations, the Cold War seems to have affected individual men’s struggles as a reflection of America’s national struggle to appear heroic and masculine in seemingly intractable individual competition that suggested national competitiveness with the Soviet Union. Part of the paradox of the fifties is that the tremendous air of triumphalism was contrary to the national insecurity related to the Soviet Union’s rise to super-power status. Most infamously, the fear mongering and desperately tough stance about proofs of anti-communist patriotism generated by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) associated with

Joseph McCarthy wracked the nation. The works of Cold War cultural historians such as

McConachie, Michael Paul Rogin, Lawrence H. Suid, and Stephen J. Whitfield lay the groundwork for this study’s analysis of Cold War cultural politics of race in South Pacific and gender in The Caine Mutiny and the Mister Roberts chapters.

While McCarthy represented the dark moments of fifties’ anti-communist hysteria, John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe were popular Cold War icons illuminating the era’s concerns with gender through stereotypes. John Wayne provided many American men with the opportunity to identify with the epitome of the “One” or lone heroic male 11

overcoming evil in the world, extending their war heroism while upholding patriotism against the corrupting influences associated with communism. By contrast, Marilyn

Monroe was used to epitomize the regressive objectifying image of “Woman-as-sex- symbol.” Although Monroe’s sexuality was simultaneously disruptive and threatening, the stereotyping of Monroe elevated masculine identity and masculine posturing for millions of veterans and other men in the new postwar society. The status of masculinity was also elevated in relation to women leaving the wartime factories and heading home so veterans could return to work.

In clarification of the terms used in this study, the term “adaptation” in the context of art and literature is used as an approximation of the process of creating new art in different forms, inspired by the former works of art (Fischlin and Fortier 3). There are many other words that relate to this concept such as version, spinoff, imitation, or abridgement. However, the term “adaptation” will be used in this study because it has general currency. Additionally, the term “adaptation” implies a process, although it can also be an endpoint, albeit adaptations are not inherently better than originals. The term

“adaptation process” refers to the way in which narratives become translated into new versions of the same form or into other forms. This can take a variety of paths such as novel text to text as theatrical script and staged production, and stage script to film script and screen production. The various forms exist together in an ongoing relationship of meaning. 12

As an adaptation, South Pacific “was faithful to the spirit of Michener's Tales o f the South Pacific, but it took many liberties in organization, structure, and interpretation”

(Block 125). Adaptation scholars refer to this concept of faithfulness as “fidelity.” For the purposes of this study, examining levels of fidelity in the adaptation process is viewed as a functional tool with which to distinguish meanings inherent in similarities and changes between source material and their adaptations. As used in this study, “fidelity” is a value neutral term that does not imply that an adaptation is good or bad if it has high or low fidelity in comparison to its source material.

With particular application to the stage, theatrical adaptation is an “intertextual apparatus,” or a system in which meaning is organized between verbal texts, singing and speaking bodies, lights, sounds, movements, and all other cultural elements at work in the actual production (Fischlin and Fortier 7). In this sense, performance as an “intertextual apparatus” is a form of adaptation or reworking of ideas that is usually based on written text, and also includes the response of the audience and critics. Musicals add yet another layer of “intertextuality,” a term that scholars Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva refer to as the idea that “all writing, like all cultural production is an interweaving of already existing cultural material” (Fischlin and Fortier 4). “Melodramatic” or emotionally exaggerated and morally simplified worlds and stories historically lend themselves to adaptation in the form of musical dramas since music amplifies the "stark emotional oppositions and tensions created by the requisite generic compression” (Hutcheon 15). It takes longer to sing than to speak a line, and longer to sing or speak than to read text. 13

Screen adaptation is also an intertextual system using light and sound in various technologies instead of live bodies and voice on stage, providing other possibilities for the forms of narration and therefore additional meanings.

The exigencies of form, or the changes between the forms of the text as novel, text as theatrical script, live stage performance, and film are a critical component of how and why ideas change in adaptation. Such formal changes inherently imply change in cultural, political, aesthetic, philosophical, financial, and other values since the process of adaptation is done for certain reasons. The change in values can range from fidelity to the source text as collaboration in admiration of the source material, to ambivalence, critique, or rejection of the original’s values in an appropriation of them. Adaptations can therefore symbolically reinscribe the embedded ideology in a given viewpoint in the source material or repress, transform, or transgress those values.

This study uses Angelo Antietam’s working definition of the term “race” “as a category, based on perceived physical differences, that carries social meanings constructed from historical, economic, political, and legal influences” (16). Antietam says that “race and racial identity typically coincide” but that “race is determined more from without than from within” (16). He also says that “[sjocial meanings of race are pervasive and can range from individual stereotypes to forms of governmental coercion”

(16-17). Ancheta uses the term “ethnicity” as “attributes that unify members of an ethnic group and provide an identity to which individuals can subscribe. These attributes include, but are not limited to, shared history, language, national origin, or culture” (17). 14

In application to the South Pacific chapter’s examination of race, the term “Other” will be used in the broad context of “postcolonial” theory put forth by founding scholars such as

Edward Said, who articulate the concept that colonialists rendered their subjects as subordinates or Others as a form of diminishment and control, generating racist images.

The term “gender” involves socially constructed meanings beyond the physical attributes of primary and secondary sexual characteristics. This study uses Donald E.

Hall’s definition of “gender” as a concept that explores the variety of ways the assignment of social roles is related to biological sex, which is connected intimately and variously to the experience of sexuality and how that experience bears on the identity of self and others (Hall 102). Masculinity in Western culture has traditionally been conflated with the universal idea of “Mankind.” As a result, feminist theory generally argues that men have been the unexamined gender category as the producers of knowledge against which women have been defined.

Feminist theater scholar Sue Ellen-Case posited foundational theory that the meanings associated with gender and the distinction between the sexes stem from the

Greek classical period’s suppression of women through the creation of the new gender role of “Woman,” privileging masculine gender and oppressing feminine gender (9).

Case persuasively evidenced the beginnings of patriarchy in classical Greek drama and culture, analyzing Aeschylus’s Oresteia as the primary cultural artifact representing the transition to patriarchy (12). Aeschylus’s trilogy splits sex and gender into “binaries” or oppositional constructions or polarities represented by the male or the masculine and the 15

female or the feminine. Examples of how masculine/feminine attributes split according to the traditional gender binaries, include a vast list of qualities, such as powerful/weak, independent/dependent, non-conformist/conformist, and individual/group.

Feminist and gender theory has stimulated new ideas about multiple constructions of gender that may correspond to masculinities and femininities, that also contests the distinction between sex and gender instead of the binary or fixed universal of “Man” and the subordinate “Woman.” While this study generally agrees with these ideas, it will use the traditional terms, “masculine” and “feminine” and the like since most cultures create meanings around the social distinction between the sexes. Likewise, traditional binaries are visibly operative in the two warship plays, their source material, and filmic adaptations. Although the binaries provide a structure for a discussion of gender, they will be shown as not splitting along precise lines in the two warship chapters.

Additionally, for feminist theorists for whom the distinction between sex and gender is maintained, what is relevant is the question of how the distinction functions. “Gender coding” refers to the rules or system in which we see gender, which, although gradually changing, have been through traditional patriarchy.

In her essay, “Feminism,” gender studies scholar Susan Hekman persuasively argues that “[h]ow society produces and maintains the distinction between men and women is one of the central elements, if not the central element, of meaning production in society” (100). Although this study modifies such a claim because there are other central elements that centrally produce social meaning, including race and class, gender is 16

one of the central elements. The general production of meaning in a society is

represented by its power dynamics. Politics and political issues are driven by the

dynamics of power. In this study, the relationship between gender, race, and political

forces stems from the idea that gender and race are inextricably entwined with power

dynamics. This renders gender and race as inherently political. Ultimately, gender, race,

and other distinctions of identity are also politically and culturally interconnected as

social constructions of power in and through each other. While the scope of this study

precludes such an analysis, it will note some of these interconnections.

For the purposes of this study, political issues will also be framed as the split

between “liberalism” and “conservativism,” terms that continue to change in meaning

over time. In this study, the term “liberal” will broadly refer to a tendency towards

tolerance of new ideas based on reason, science, progress, freedom, and happiness, which

include freedom from bigotry and prejudice. The term “conservative” will generally

refer to a tendency to preserve traditional values and attitudes and to resist change. In

addition to the shifting meanings in the political distinctions between liberal and

conservative, complexity and paradox exist within these polarities as they do within the

representations of gender and race. For example, mostly liberal administrations have led

the United States into war, and particularly relative to this study, the quintessential liberal

administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the U.S. into World War II. Yet in partisan terms, conservatives have traditionally wanted to stay independent or out of

global affairs. However, the decision to go to war, as well as war itself, is heavily 17

associated with traditional masculine authority through the military and nationalism,

typically associated with the notion of conservativism. Therefore, the term

“conservative” will also be placed in the broader context of historical patriarchy.

The ordinary intersection between gender dualities and political polarities is one

that sees the axis of masculine and conservative joined in opposition to feminine and

liberal. However, the exigencies of war as played out in the adaptation processes under

examination create disruptions in that alignment fueled by the paradox of the fifties. For

example, in the warship dramas, the masculine/individualist and feminine/conformist

binaries stop lining up as such when the hyper-masculine war heroes become

effeminately and conservatively conforming and self-sacrificing. Masculine and

conservative will be shown as joining in opposition to feminine and liberal in the

breaking apart of the traditional axes in the warship dramas.

In Lionel Trilling’s groundbreaking volume of essays, Liberal Imagination

(1950), the highly influential literary critic — also a Freudian, non-Stalinist Marxist and a

Jew — critiqued what he considered to be dogmatic constraints on midcentury liberalism.

While Trilling did not specifically define liberalism, other than to say he believed it to be

“a large tendency rather than a body of doctrine,” his critical framework in this volume is

being used in this study because it is contemporary with the materials under examination

(Preface x). Trilling said that midcentury liberalism reflected a complacent, simplifying tendency that naively attempted to organize life according to rationality, progress, and the panacea of economics and other social sciences. He said this lack of rigor led to 18

conformities such as the growing midcentury corporate and public bureaucracies.

Trilling argued that dogmatic liberalism eschewed modulation, irony, complexity, and the inevitability of human tragedy. His critique was largely a response to Western Stalinist intellectuals during the Cold War who resolutely ignored the authoritarian abuses of the

Soviet Union.

Trilling also contended that what Freud contributed that is of “the greatest importance” and outweighing Freud’s “errors,” is what Freud had to say about the nature and function of literature:

Despite popular belief to the contrary, man, as Freud conceives him, is not

to be understood by any simple formula (such as sex) but is rather an

inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not

simply good; he has, as Freud says somewhere, a kind of hell within him

from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization.

He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure

and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he

pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with

defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best

qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. (Trilling 57)

Trilling’s compelling understanding of liberalism and Freud provide a concluding context for this study, particularly for the analysis of gender as a lens on liberal and conservative forces in the Mister Roberts and The Caine Mutiny adaptation processes. Analyzing 19

tangled gender representations through the traditional binary as a way to view the joint forces of midcentury liberalism and conservativism or the complicated shifts in the representations of race only provide a framework to suggest the complexity of midcentury values represented in the adaptation process. The paradox of the fifties is glimpsed through these subjects of inquiry, in addition to how increasing conservativism is revealed in which race realities and those of gender are subverted below the surface as the page travels to the stage and screen. 20

Chapter 1: South Pacific

I. Background

South Pacific (1949) by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua

Logan, inspired by James Michener's novel, Tales o f the South Pacific (1947), became an icon of “Broadway’s so-called Golden Age — roughly between 1943 to 1964” (Maslon

44). In its roaring success, South Pacific narrowly missed becoming the longest running musical of the 1940s, with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! achieving the longest run. For the enthusiastic audience of the time, South Pacific showed expert craft and creativity in the context of the midcentury Broadway stage in its courageous statement for racial tolerance and justice.

Michener's Tales o f the South Pacific opens with the routine heroism of the

American serviceman in World War II, which comprises most of its stories. The novel also decries racial prejudice and injustice in a few key stories and ends tying the two themes together at the novel’s close. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical South Pacific emphasized the theme of race and ethnicity more than the theme of war. This study’s focus is on race in the South Pacific adaptation process since the musical’s current rate of an average of 450 annual productions worldwide continues to contribute to ongoing visions of race as individual, group, and national identity. This chapter aims to show how the South Pacific adaptation process represents increasingly conservative values in a complex pattern of cultural anxiety about race, although the novel and its adaptations still achieve a brave transformational call for racial justice for their time. Additionally, the 21

chapter aims to illuminate cultural anxieties about race as a reflection of the paradox of the 1950s and its tensions related to individualism and conformity, which stem from the postwar culture of victory and the immediately adjacent Cold War as discussed above in the Introduction.

James A. Michener's life (1907-1997) is emblematic of the American liberal democratic dream of freedom and the pursuit of justice in the context of midtwentieth century America’s possibility. Abandoned at birth, Michener was adopted by a poor

Quaker widow in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, who took in laundry and sewing, but James also had to spent periods in the local poorhouse when they could not get by. James Salter describes Michener as “one of those Dickensian figures . . . annealed by poverty, made good-hearted and true by it” (5). Michener absorbed the Quaker values of simplicity, peace and justice, and the view of a common humanity while becoming an avid student of ideas and life. An intrepid adventurer, he worked a variety of odd jobs and traveled the U.S. before embarking on a formal education at Swarthmore College through a scholarship. Michener went to graduate school at Harvard’s School of Education and became an assistant visiting professor of history at Harvard, after which he took a job as a textbook editor in New York before the start of World War II.

With the advent of Pearl Harbor, almost thirty-five years old and now married for the first time, Michener was called up in 1943 as a naval reservist. Despite being exempt as a Quaker and being “one of the oldest men to be taken,” he went to the South Pacific as a naval historian where he witnessed a naval and air war unlike any other (Michener 22

6). Nightly, he sat with the men who were directly in harm’s way, listening and then writing up their stories. He wrote Tales o f the South Pacific while based on Espiritu

Santo, the location that inspired his novel. He also traveled the islands, inspecting installations, delivering dispatches, and supervising transport supplies for the remaining two years of the war and two more afterwards. At age forty, in 1948, he won the Pulitzer

Prize for fiction, a huge achievement for a first time author.

Michener moved to Honolulu in 1949 with his second wife, who he later divorced, and continued to travel widely. He published more than four-dozen books, mostly historical novels that have been translated into virtually every language, all distinguished by his thorough research in a productive and lucrative fifty-five year career.

A lifelong Democrat, Michener devoted time to public service, including a lost bid for

Congress in 1962 as a liberal Democrat in a staunch conservative district. In 1955, he married Mari Yoriko Sabusawa, the American daughter of Japanese parents, to whom he remained married for 39 years until her death; he did not have any children. During the war, Sabusawa and her parents had been detained in an internment camp. Michener, who lived modestly despite wealth from his books, said he was always haunted by his years of poverty and gave away an estimated $100,000,000, mostly to colleges and universities.

Michener achieved critical acclaim in addition to the Pulitzer for his Tales o f the

South Pacific. The New York Times critic Orville Prescott praised the novel as follows:

"Michener produced one of the best works of fiction yet to come out of the w ar.. . . [he] has dug deep into the character and behavior of men at war and made by implication 23

many a pointed comment on courage, boredom, discipline, love and sex" (1947, p. 17).

David Dempsey of The New York Times also highly praised the novel, but said that

Michener’s skill as a storyteller offsets the novel’s flaw of occasional overly “windy” characters since he is never “dull” (5). However, the novel was not an immediate best seller, initially selling about twenty-five thousand copies. Sales soared after Michener received the Pulitzer, and the novel was adapted as the musical that raised it and its characters to “that level where art becomes history” (Salter 6).

The musical South Pacific has had several major productions. The 1949 production premiered on March 5 at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven prior to its April

7 opening on Broadway at the Majestic Theatre in New York. At the start of the run,

Mary Martin played Nellie Forbush, Ezio Pinza played Emile de Becque, Juanita Hall played Bloody Mary, Ray Walston played Luther Billis, and William Tabbert played Joe

Cable. South Pacific was adored, critically and popularly, in almost every way, winning nine Tony awards. It was also the second musical ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for

Drama (1950); the first was O f Thee I Sing (1932). South Pacific's original run lasted nearly five years with 1,925 performances, playing to an estimated 3.5 million people.

Between 1950 and 1955, it also ran in a steady stream of limited engagements in San

Francisco and 116 other U.S. cities, as well as internationally in Melbourne, Stockholm, and Madrid. At London's Drury Lane Theatre, it ran for an impressive 802 performances between 1951 and 1953, directed by Joshua Logan with Mary Martin reprising her role as 24

Nellie Forbush. The black-and-white rehearsal film of this production is the only extant film based on the original Broadway production.

Joshua Logan directed the 1958 Hollywood movie of South Pacific, Paul Osborne wrote the book, Mitzi Gaynor played Nellie Forbush, Rossano Brazzi was Emile de

Becque, Juanita Hall played Bloody Mary, Ray Walston was Luther Billis, and John Kerr played Joe Cable. The movie was artistically controversial (Maslon 173). Logan considered Mary Martin too old for the part of Nellie on the widescreen and instead chose Mitzi Gaynor, whose downside was her "forced sunniness" (Maslon 168). Only

Gaynor and Walston, who reprised his role from the Broadway stage, sang their roles.

The dubbing of other voices was problematic. The movie was also considered to be over­ produced, a "picture both blessed and cursed by bigness.. . . " (Scheuer). Additional problems included distracting color mists in addition to the blaring sound (Crowther,

Scheuer). One critic said that "20th Century-Fox has wrapped a fancy package — and lost the story inside, "and it no longer "seem[s] real, nor does their plight touch the heart, or even matter" (Zinssner). Despite mixed reviews, the score, spectacle, and the beauty of the Kauai location made the film a commercial success as the third highest grossing

1950s movie, suggesting the strength of the material transcended the film’s flaws.

To celebrate Rodgers's centenary birthday in 2001, Trevor Nunn directed South

Pacific at London's Royal National Theater, although it only ran for five months. Bartlett

Sher directed the highly acclaimed 2008 revival of South Pacific at the Vivian Beaumont

Theater at Lincoln Center, which won seven Tony awards including Best Musical 25

Revival and Best Director. Kelli O'Hara began the run as Nellie Forbush, Paolo Szot was

Emile de Becque2, Loretta Abies Sayre played Bloody Mary, Danny Burstein played

Luther Billis, and Andrew Samonsky was Joe Cable. It ran for over two years, and its well-reviewed U.S. and Canadian touring production is still traveling as of this submission date. The production was called "lovely beyond description," echoing

Michener's opening lines in the novel about the beauty of the South Pacific (Roman and

Wolf). Critics were thrilled with Robert Russell Bennett's orchestration and praised the singers. Again echoing the 1949 reviews, Rodgers and Hammerstein's score was cited as

"the incontrovertible star" (Lahr), and Michael Eagan’s Bali Ha'i backdrop (spelled Bali- ha’i in the novel), the scenic star, which "recall[s] the mysterious water of Jo Mielziner’s painting in the 1949 Broadway show" (Roman and Wolf).

II. Descriptions of the Novel and Adaptations

Tales o f the South Pacific is comprised of nineteen mostly interwoven stories with

“occasional reappearing characters apart from the narrator, the unnamed Michener himself’ (Salter 6). It is about the Navy and marines stationed on islands in the Pacific during the Second World War, depicting military base life during the interminable waiting for action as well as the brief intense moments of fighting battles. The short introductory chapter of the novel, called "The South ," establishes one of the

2 The novel spells Emile’s last name as De Becque, while the musical script spells it as de Becque; this study uses the respective spellings accordingly. 26

novel’s themes of the routine serviceman as hero in the preservation of America’s central values of freedom and democracy. Additional themes include race, nostalgia, romance, the horror of war, and maturation to adulthood. Melodrama, drama and comedy are variously employed throughout the novel.

The novel opens with the following lines, which are also emblazoned onto a screen curtain covering the stage at the start of the 2008 revival, although not stipulated in the theatrical script and not present in the original Broadway production:

I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The

endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands But whenever

I start to talk about the South Pacific, people intervene.. . . and the first thing you

know I’m telling about some old Tonkinese woman who used to sell human

heads. As souvenirs. For fifty dollars! Or somebody asks me, "What was

Guadalcanal actually like?” And before I can describe that godforsaken

backwash of the world, I'm rambling on about the Remittance Man, who lived

among the Japs and sent us radio news of their movements. That is, he sent the

news until one day .. . (Michener 1946, 1).

The last story, "The Cemetery at Hoga Point," has text that is emblazoned onto the revival’s closing screen as its closing frame. In this last story, two African Americans, the preacher and Denis, whose speech is written in dialect, have been sent from the kitchen duty to stand watch over the cemetery grounds, banished over a trifle by a racist tyrannical officer who replaces the beloved Commander Hoag previously killed in action. 27

The preacher relays the final fates of the narrator’s friends, key characters who have

become the heroic martyrs lying in the graves below. While telling their fates, he

expresses fear that his hopes for racial justice at home will not be served since the real

heroes are lying at his feet. Text from this last story, inscribed on the 2008 revival’s

closing screen, contains the narrator’s reflection about the graveyard:

They will live a long time, these men of the South Pacific. They had an

American quality. They, like their victories, will be remembered as long

as our generation lives. After that, like the men of the Confederacy, they

will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obscure them,

until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley

Forge. (Michener 12).

The two interwoven stories in the novel that are central to the musical’s narrative

and subsequent adaptations are "Our Heroine" and "Fo' Dolla." Twenty-one-year-old

American nurse Nellie Forbush from Otolousa, Arkansas, is introduced in "Our Heroine"

as she is getting over her romance with the pompous Lieut. Harbison. Nellie is

characterized as naive, adventurous and pretty, having had the courage to join the Navy

as a nurse, despite her sheltered Southern upbringing. Nellie is smitten with the

successful middle-aged, French planter Emile De Becque who is introduced to her as a

Resistance hero who fought against General Petain and arrested fascist sympathizers in the South Pacific islands. Nellie and De Becque fall in love at a party at his house, two weeks after which he proposes marriage. But Nellie finds out that De Becque has four 28

daughters by four women he had previously lived with, but had never married. The women were of different ethnicities, Javanese, Polynesian, and Tonkinese. Nellie's older friend, Dinah, a navy nurse from a northern city, reminds Nellie that she isn’t worried about De Becque for Nellie, and that he has kept everyone's respect.

Nellie soon discovers that De Becque has an additional four children living with him, two half-Tonkinese who she admires “as beautiful as only Eurasian girls can be,” and two half-Polynesian, whose “golden complexions” she also appreciates (Michener

137). The four other older daughters live together on another island where the oldest and unhappily married sister, Latouche de Becque Barzan, runs a salon for Allied officers.

Photographs of the four older girls horrify Nellie when she observes the two half-

Polynesians have dark skin color. De Becque, who respects his previous partners, tells

Nellie that he has no apologies because he came to the South Pacific as a young man, implying that there were no available white women. Nellie, horrified by the mother and the two dark-skinned children, tells De Becque that she can't marry him. Dinah, with gentle satire, goads Nellie beyond her prejudice, calling her “Our Heroine.” Nellie returns to De Becque’s plantation to accept his marriage proposal.

In the story, "Fo' Dolla," Lieut. Joe Cable, an experienced navy bomber pilot, is sent by the Navy to shut down the hut of the fifty-five year-old Tonkinese grass skirt and souvenir seller, Bloody Mary. She and her beautiful Tonkinese teenage daughter, Liat, live on Bali-ha'i, a neighboring island where the girls and women were moved to protect them from rape before the U.S. military arrived. Bloody Mary wears sloppy dress and 29

has dark reddish-tinged stains on her mouth, chin, and teeth from chewing betel nuts for

their mild narcotic, which derives from an ancient and still widely practiced custom from

Asia to the South Pacific.

Joe Cable, from the upper-class Philadelphia Mainline and a Princeton man with

an Ivy League girlfriend, is described as "a powerfully confident man.... and therefore

an attractive fellow" (Michener 179). Bloody Mary senses that Cable is "big stuff'

saying "here's a man" and “You no soandso GI,” which to her means he stands out as

extraordinary and not just anybody or a ‘so and so’ (175). She doesn’t scare him off as

she has others the military has sent to get rid of her souvenir hut. Cable finds Bloody

Mary interesting and befriends her, regularly talking with her in French about Tonkin

China and other subjects.

Later, Bloody Mary orchestrates a sexual liaison between Cable and Liat in her

hut on the top of the hill on Bali-ha'i. Cable does not know the virginal Liat is Bloody

Mary's daughter until after they have sex. Bloody Mary wants Cable to marry Liat, but

when Cable refuses, Bloody Mary threatens to blackmail him by yelling into a

megaphone that he goes to Bali-h'ai regularly to have sex with the girl. At this, Cable

slaps Mary across the face, and she perceives that Cable has been deeply moved by Liat,

although he still says he cannot take Liat home with him. Bloody Mary offers Cable

money that she and her brother in Hanoi have saved so that Cable and Liat can live on

Bali-ha'i or in China "as other white men do with Chinese wives" (Michener 213). She tells Cable that Tonkinese marry for economic reasons, not romantic reasons. Liat, who 30

is educated and speaks “exquisite French,” tells Cable that she knows their marriage

could never be, but she wishes she could have a baby with him (223). If he left, at least

she'd have his child. She also challenges his not taking her to lunch with the French nuns

because she is Tonkinese; but he takes her there.

When Cable goes to Bali-ha'i for the last time, he is stunned to hear that Liat has

left to marry the cruel, older alcoholic Jacques Benoit, a French planter. At Cable and

Liat's last encounter before he departs for battle, she weeps, saying she cannot live

without him. Fie gives her the watch his grandfather gave his father, who wore it in

World War I, and then runs to the mission transport truck. Meanwhile, Bloody Mary

with her grass skirt bundle walks in the path of the truck carrying Cable and the men to

the mission. She takes the watch Cable gave Liat and shatters it on the ground,

screaming profanities at Cable. Upon hearing this, the men on the truck taunt Cable,

calling him "Fo' Dolla," Bloody Mary's price for the skirts.

In the novel, Lieut. Tony Fry, the central protagonist is an iconoclast and well

loved for breaking rules to improve troop morale, even joining them in battle when he

doesn’t have to. Tony and the American men are entranced by Anderson’s bravery,

whom they also refer to as “the Remittance Man” since he goes behind enemy lines on an

extremely dangerous mission, successfully sending back radio messages with the location

of the Japanese fleet and changing the course of the Pacific war (Michener 86).

Anderson is an otherwise ordinary British man, except for his marriage to a "black" native villager who the American men refer to as a "savage" (Ibid.). Tony marries the 31

beautiful salon seductress and much lauded Eurasian beauty, Latouche, Emile’s oldest, part-Javanese daughter. Tony, who is called into action right after the wedding ceremony, dies on the mission in a blockhouse raid in which he didn’t have to participate.

However, other white officers who marry Latouche's three racially mixed sisters are not killed off.

Luther Billis, a working-class street-smart Seabee, who appears in a few stories, is described a "big, fat and brown" man (Michener 152). In flamboyantly native style, he wears a gold ring in his left ear, frangipani flowers in his hair, extensive native jewelry, and many tattoos. His jewelry includes a heavy silver slave bracelet with his name engraved on it and a double tusk boar's bracelet. Billis speaks fluent Beche Le Mer, the language of New Guinea, in addition to other native tongues. He is also an inveterate souvenir collector and has one tattoo that proves he is an honorary member of the

Vanicoro island tribe with whom he participated in the boar's tooth ceremony; the

Vanicoro tribe is feared as the most “savage” in these islands. Tony, who respects Billis, is fascinated, and they go to Vanicoro joined by the doctor and the chaplain. Billis is deeply respectful towards the natives and their ritual, instinctually understanding the ritual’s meaning and adding insights to the chaplain's anthropological analysis.

The 1949 South Pacific musical opens with an image of Emile de Becque's patio and his two and only "Eurasian" children, Ngana, about eleven years old, and Jerome about eight, in contrast to the novel’s eight daughters (Rodgers, Hammerstein, and

Logan, 3). The children are singing "Dites-moi Pourquoi," a French song about love as 32

the beauty and joy of life. Aside from the conceit tying the two stories together as a

musical, the overall plot structure and the characters that appear in the musical’s script

and production retain fidelity to the two main interwoven stories from the book, including

the two principal romances. Instead of repeating similarities between the stories in the

novel and the musical, what follows is a description of essential differences formed from

their interweaving. The main plot difference is that in the musical, Cable, rather than

Anderson, joins de Becque to go behind enemy lines to radio back information about the

location of the Japanese fleet; Anderson is not a character in the musical. Cable

persuades him because de Becque feels he does not have much left to lose after Nellie has

rejected their engagement.

Other differences between the novel and the musical flow from this plot change.

When Nellie hears Cable has died and de Becque is on the mission, she realizes she

wants to marry him. Returning to de Becque’s home to be with his children and wait for

his return, although she does not know if he’s still alive, Nellie serves the children a

meal, tells them that she loves them, delighting them. Together, the three reprise "Dites-

moi Pourquoi" observed by de Becque, who surprises them upon returning from the

mission by joining in the song. The script ends with de Becque's singing the words, "La

vie est gai!" (life is gay) as Nellie and he hold hands, sealing their engagement. This

contrasts with the end of the novel’s story entitled "Our Heroine," where De Becque is already at home, as he had not joined Anderson on the mission. Also, in contrast to the 33

novel, Billis is the buffoon character and the musical adapts as comedy the novel's story of the native boar's tooth ceremony, but without a direct representation of the ritual.

Clues as to what the original musical must have been like are available in a variety of materials from the period. The African American Juanita Hall played Bloody

Mary in the Broadway production as well as in the Hollywood movie. The Drury Lane rehearsal film reveals that the original musical closely followed the original musical script. Since race is the principal subject of this chapter, the following details are here since they are relevant to the subsequent analysis. In particular, the Drury Lane film as well as the original Broadway production photos enable skin color comparisons that illuminate casting decisions about race, decisions that shed light on related midcentury cultural politics. Although the Drury Lane film is in black-and-white with only a few close-ups, Ngana and Jerome’s skin color appears to be fairly light in color, leaning more towards white than towards half-Polynesian. It is similar to their skin color in the original Broadway production photos. The native Pacific Island characters who silently walk across the stage in the Bali-ha'i scenes also appear either white or not clearly as

Other in both the Drury Lane film and the Broadway photos.

In the Broadway production photos and the Drury Lane film, there is also only one African American actor playing a Seabee in the chorus, who also happens to dance a brief soft-shoe routine. In the original production photos and the film, Luther Billis, a white character, looks like a typical white Seabee with a few native adornments, but not like the "big brown skin" man described in the novel thoroughly bedecked with extensive 34

tattoos, native jewelry, and flowers. Nor does Bloody Mary look like she has the novel's four black rivulets of betel juice on her chin and dark stains on her teeth as she is described as having in the novel.

The 1958 Hollywood movie, South Pacific, broadly followed the musical script with regard to the plot and characters, but reordered some scenes and used only some of

Hammerstein's wording. The movie's narrative action opens without the musical's initial family tableau, instead showing Joe Cable talking to the pilot in the cockpit as he’s flown to the naval base for his new assignment. Unlike the musical, Cable is additionally depicted on the mission on the fictional Marie Louise Island right after he dies as de

Becque's native guide covers his corpse with palm fronds. The movie also adds a scene with Billis and Cable arriving at the boar ceremony where native islanders are doing vigorous ritual dances, walking on hot coals, beating drums, and chanting. With regard to casting and makeup choices, Ngana and Jerome's Otherness as half-Polynesian is again toned down, titling more towards white than half-Polynesian. Additionally, there is only one African American man in the chorus of Seabees.

The 2008 Broadway revival at Lincoln Center carefully follows the original script as well as the original production’s values, although it is enhanced by contemporary technology that enriches the design values. One significant change is the addition of the preshow screen curtain that suggests the page of an old book onto which are emblazoned the opening paragraphs of the first story of the novel as cited above. This screen lifts as the musical's action begins with Ngana and Jerome running out on de Becque's patio. 35

The children's skin color — at least in productions this spectator observed in 2009 at

Lincoln Center and in San Francisco, as well as in the 2010 public television broadcast — seems to be more discernibly dark, along with additional features that represent racial

Otherness, in contrast to the more tempered images in the mid-twentieth-century adaptations, or those in 1949, 1951, and 1958 as described above.

Another important change is the presence of three black Seabees in the chorus of white Seabees, instead of the one in the original production who is integrated in with the white Seabees. In the revival, the black characters stay mostly separate as a group apart from the white group, and none of them do the soft shoe dance the one black actor does in the original musical. Loretta Abies Sayre, who plays Bloody Mary, is Asian

American. Bloody Mary's mouth has clearly visible betel juice stains that are evident in the close-up in the 2010 live Lincoln Center public television broadcast of the production.

Billis is again a typical Seabee with a few tattoos and adornments, but not a deeply tanned "brown man" extensively decorated with native designs and objects as in the novel. At the show's conclusion after the final family tableau, another off-white screen curtain descends covering the stage. But this time, it is emblazoned with the last paragraph of the first story in the novel, "The South Pacific," that links the heroes of the three American wars, as cited above. 36

III. Analysis of Race

Tales o f the South Pacific as the source material for the musical script and its stage and screen adaptations represents a rich mix of highly visual and dramatic locations, melodramatic stories, comic characters, incidents, and images that are ripe for the stage and screen. The novel also portrays how war brought people of disparate races and cultures together from various parts of the world for the first time. This chapter will show that through the lens of race, the South Pacific adaptation process reveals the fifties’ paradox of liberal and conservative tensions related to stress between individualism and conformity. The collision between individuality and conformity arose from the cultures of postwar triumphalism and the Cold War as described above in the

Introduction. In the musical, race becomes the main theme representing the contradiction of fighting for freedom and justice in the war, juxtaposed to the lack of racial justice at home, foreshadowing, and intensifying the analogy of simmering stateside racial tensions more centrally than the novel. However, the novel’s opening thematic trajectory starts with war heroism in its opening stories and moves to tying in racial justice at home to war heroes as discussed below to its closing story.

The trajectory of war heroism in the musical script and original production and its subsequent adaptations merits articulation prior to the analysis of race since war is the novel’s central theme, and the war brought together diverse cultures and races. How the adaptations compress the novel’s theme of war heroism while shifting the focus to race, and how prejudice is both sustained and transformed relative to the times, are central to 37

the analysis in this chapter. Although this chapter agrees with Geoffrey Block that

“ South Pacific softens some of the less savory aspects of plot and character” as it is adapted from the novel to the musical stage (126), this chapter further argues that such

“softening” and other changes seem to reveal a pattern where specific liberal representations of race become compromised and therefore culturally more conservative as they travel to the stage and screen. The 2008 Broadway revival restores the original stage musical’s values, but changes the original’s framing as examined in this conclusion.

The novel’s interwoven stories move toward the final battle fictionally called

“Operation Alligator” placed on the fictional island of Kuralei, whose dead heroes rest in the fictional cemetery at Hoga Point in the final story. The idea of nation inherent in the novel's “Ordinary Man-as-hero” theme is about the idea of the regular (typically male) soldier giving his life to his country for a just war. This idea of nation is directly observed in the novel's opening and closing texts about nostalgia for the “Ordinary Man- as-hero,” although the closing text also anticipates racial strife at home. The opening text foreshadows Anderson's bravery and the mythic proportions he holds among soldiers because he alters the course of the Pacific war by dying horribly while coast watching to alert the arrival of the Japanese fleet.

The idea of nation represented in the ending paragraph of the novel’s first story,

"The South Pacific," cited previously as the 2008 revival’s closing screen inscription, connects the Pacific war heroes to the American Revolution and the Civil War, linking

America's three victorious wars on behalf of a democratic U.S. government. This text 38

points to the irony of how memory is mitigated by time and history, amplifying the

legacy of the theme of the “Ordinary Man-as-hero” in the Pacific war. The novel’s theme

of the idea of the “Ordinary Man-as-hero” and its relationship to nation is also echoed in

the actions and rhetoric of its central protagonist, Lieut. Tony Fry. It is again reprised in

the closing story about the cemetery where Michener makes a plea to take the just war

home to the fight for civil rights and a common humanity.

In the shift away from the novel's strong central theme of the “Ordinary Man-as-

hero” in defense of democratic nation to the theme of race in adaptation, the theme of the

“Ordinary Man-as-hero” is not completely lost. It becomes compressed and amplified in

Joe Cable's death and interwoven with the novel’s subtheme of race. Additionally

supporting the “Ordinary Man-as-hero” theme in the adaptation process, Luther Billis's

comic, inadvertently heroic plane caper replaces a serious episode about a downed-plane

ordeal from the novel, as does de Becque's participation in Cable’s critical mission.

Since the form and temporal dimension of the stage as well as the screen necessitate

compression, plots can become more powerful, which in turn affect new meanings. Here,

Cable's death in the musical is elevated to the mythos of Anderson's death in the novel,

since Cable becomes the martyr who saves the Pacific war in the conflation with

Anderson’s character.

The original musical’s important frame of interracial family is its opening image,

with de Becque’s mixed-race children, Ngana and Jerome, singing “Dites-Moi” on their veranda. Nellie and Emile are heard offstage in another part of the house. However, in 39

the Hollywood movie, the opening shots are instead of Cable and the pilot flying over the

islands to land on the base where they observe the servicemen negotiating with Bloody

Mary. As Geoffrey Block points out, when the movie gets to de Becque’s veranda, it

omits the scene of the children and “Dites-Moi” until the end of the movie. In the context

of this study, this filmic choice forestalls the musical’s announcement of its liberal theme

of racial tolerance by pushing back the musical’s foreshadowing of Nellie’s decision

regarding race, and the foreshadowing of stateside racial turmoil and imminent reform.

Instead, the movie shot emphasizes Cable’s story as the arrival of the military

hero, placing the opening emphasis on the military over romance, according to Geoffrey

Block’s analysis. But it also supersedes the ideas about racial tolerance and the plea for

reform, particularly since the opening credits include the backdrop of presumably

indentured laborers on de Becque’s plantation. Additionally, the movie’s focus on the

war hero seems to suggest recapturing the novel’s opening frame with the reference to

war and Anderson’s heroism. The movie image of the plane also feels like it is mostly

about the excitement of the midcentury’s new Todd AO and Cinamascope capabilities

regarding what the camera was now able to “see” in how it captured the beauty of the

islands from aloft, in an example of how the exigencies of form influence adaptation values. Likewise, the movie’s direct but sanitized image of Cable’s dead body, which is not in the stage musical, reveals the beauty of the area and feels similarly motivated while also further amplifying Cable’s heroism. 40

The next set of images in the opening scene in the original musical after the

children sing on the veranda is de Becque and Nellie’s romance and his proposal of

marriage, along with the songs “ A Cockeyed Optimist” and “Some Enchanted Evening.”

The musical’s initial scenes of the children and the romantic pair along with the

emotionally engaging songs convey the social promise of the idea of mixed-race family

as a natural part of the new America as the opening thematic frame. Instead, the next

scene in the movie after Cable’s plane lands is of the men singing and dancing to the

song “Bloody Mary,” where Billis, trying to convince Bloody Mary to buy his grass

skirts for resale, engages in this exchange: Bloody Mary first says, “[G]ive you ten

dolla'... Not enough? . . . Den you damn well keep...,“ and Billis retorts, “Now look

here, Dragon Lady ...” (Rodgers, Hammerstein and Logan 25). In contrast to the

romantic foreshadowing of the image of the potential and harmony of the idea of mixed-

race family in the opening of the musical, the movie’s opening image of race is

humorously contentious. Billis’s retort of “Dragon Lady” is in the musical and the

movie, but it is not used in the novel.

Billis’s use of this disparaging stereotype in both the musical and the movie

render them more conservative than in the novel in the sense of the demonized Asian,

which was common during the war in propaganda. However, this chapter argues that the

subtextual colonialist issues underlying Bloody Mary’s character in adaptation also contain cultural and political complexity originating in the novel that suggest her character does not solely represent the stereotypical “Dragon Lady.” The term 41

“colonialist” is related to postcolonial discourse, or the exploration of the role of

Otherness in colonial relations between the dominant colonizing power and the nondominant peoples, including how colonizers justified and naturalized their domination of the colonized (Counsell and Wolf 95-96).

The stereotype of the “Dragon Lady” has Western roots in the late 19 th century literature and imagery of “Yellow Peril” or the fear of Japanese and Chinese expansion and that cheap Asian labor in America would replace white jobs. This fear became represented by the polarization and demonization of images of Asians in popular culture, in addition to the vilification of China’s Empress Dowager. But the term “Dragon Lady” may have been coined in the West by the 1930’s Milton Caniff comic strip, Terry and the

Pirates, which set the standard for the stereotype in comics, in addition to the stereotypical roles Anna May Wong played in the movies, most notably Daughter o f the

Dragon (1931), Shanghai Express (1932) and Limehouse Blues (1934), (Prasso 78).

Wong played the “Dragon Lady” stereotype in her films as well as the opposing stereotype of the loved and abandoned submissive Asian girl in the reworking of

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly story (Prasso 2).

Asian cultural scholar Sheng-Mei Ma contends that in Terry and the Pirates, the contradictions of the evil “Dragon Lady” and her counterpart in the passive “Butterfly” set up the prototype of the Orientalizing demonization and domestication of the Other

(Preface xx). “Orientalism,” a term coined by Edward Said, suggests that Western stereotypes of Asians are based on the subject and subjugation of the East as Other, 42

implying a will or intention to understand, often to control, manipulate and sometimes incorporate what is a manifestly different world. “Oriental” difference and the projection of exoticism rely on real and imaginative distance enabled by colonialism wherein power and values become polarized between the East and the West.

Before a closer analysis is done looking at Bloody Mary as the Orientalized

“Dragon Lady” stereotype, scholarly references arguing that Bloody Mary is the stereotypical “Dragon Lady” with Liat as her “Butterfly” counterpart are noted here.

Asian cultural scholar Sheridan Prasso, who wrote about the Hollywood adaptation, said

Billis’s first encounter with Bloody Mary where he calls her “Dragon Lady,” which is also used in the musical, “dispels any doubt about her role” (94). Prasso concluded that

Bloody Mary’s role as “Dragon Lady” is evidenced by how she procures her innocent daughter, Liat, whose sexual availability is juxtaposed to Nellie’s propriety in waiting for marriage, typifying “the asian-woman-as-prostitute/sex-vixen” (94).

Philip D. Beidler, who wrote about the overall narrative through the adaptation process in relation to midcentury military and financial forces, concurred with the idea of

Bloody Mary as a procuress, saying, “East meets West through a Tonkinese black- marketeer’s sale to an upper crust American lieutenant of her virginal daughter” (49).

Roman and Wolf, in a literary theater review of the 2008 revival, also argued that Bloody

Mary represents “the overbearing dragon lady” as the demonized stereotype of the

Japanese aggressor as seen in U.S. war propaganda, with Liat as its flip side or the idealized "beautiful but submissive butterfly"(3). Broadway cultural theater scholar 43

Andrea Most, who wrote about the original musical, additionally contended that Bloody

Mary sells her daughter to Cable, and that Bloody Mary and Liat are stereotypical Asian

females. Andrea Most claimed they are drawn “directly from World War II film

stereotypes” with Bloody Mary akin to the shrill crafty “grinning Chinese peasants with

betel-stained teeth” and Liat to “the classic stereotype of the exotic oriental woman”

(158).

Caniff s original comic strip was blatantly racist with the heroic or “good”

Western male characters exploiting the “bad” Oriental characters. In the strip, the

“Dragon Lady” is a sexually alluring otherworldly beauty dressed in tight serpentine

outfits who runs a crime gang replete with torture chamber and medieval henchmen. She

also loves, loses, and is obsessed with her abandonment by the hero, which ramps up her

vindictive viciousness, including remorseless murder, torture, and the lack of empathy or

maternal feeling. While Bloody Mary has characteristics of the inscrutability of the

Orientalized enigmatic “Asian-as-Other”, she is not an antagonist the heroes must reckon

with, which is a central characteristic of the “Dragon Lady.” Rather, this chapter argues

that the white Americans and the French colonialists are the antagonists with whom

Bloody Mary must contend. Additionally, even though Bloody Mary sadly traps her

daughter in a well-intentioned romance that ends up causing them both great pain, she is

not a mere cold-hearted evil mother or villainess.

Bloody Mary and Liat are Tonkinese from Tonkin China, or what a part of

Vietnam was known as in the 1940s. They are not directly from China, a U.S. ally in 44

World War II, but likely were seen as broadly Asian in the imagination of the midcentury

American audience that was not yet widely aware of the area that would become

Vietnam. This was an audience that was probably also ambivalent about the Japanese, having just emerged from the war. Historically, as the war heated up, so did demonizing and Orientalizing fantasies of the “Asian-as-Other.” However, while Japan as the “evil empire” was a frequent image in war propaganda, at one point in the novel, Michener represents an American soldier imagining a dead Japanese man’s family as he gazes at the dead man’s face in a humanizing gesture towards the dreaded enemy.

Although Michener also depicts terror of the Japanese enemy, he makes a distinction in the novel between fearsome Japanese enemy actions and the behavior of

Bloody Mary, Liat, and other Tonkinese who labor on the French colonial plantations surrounding the U.S. naval bases. For example, Tony Fry and his scouting expedition in search of Anderson find the terrible sight of Anderson and the villagers beheaded by the

Japanese who have put their heads on poles as warnings to the Allies; beheadings were a fact of Japanese warfare in the Pacific war. Whites use Bloody Mary and Liat as Others, but the two characters are not feared in any sense similar to how the novel portrays the

Japanese enemy. Billis calls Bloody Mary “Dragon Lady” in the musical as a power play to try to intimidate her when he attempts to win the grass skirt deal. His use of the term doesn’t prove her demonization at the level of the “Dragon Lady” of the comic strip or

Wong’s key movies. It reveals the projection of the dominant culture’s Orientalizing of the Other. 45

The Americans’ lack of exposure to South Pacific cultures is evident when an

American doctor at a party asks De Becque who helped build his plantation: "[T]he yellow people I saw outside. They're not Javanese, are they?" De Becque explains that

"they are very fine workers" brought over from Tonkin China (Michener 126), an answer that also reveals De Becque’s privileged colonialist status. White colonial patronage, prejudice, and elitism are also represented in the novel when Nellie's friend, Dinah, who is supposedly the more sophisticated “liberal” Northerner, asks De Becque, "[h]ow did you train the [Tonkinese] natives to serve so well? They actually seem to enjoy it" (126).

It is hard not to read irony as Michener’s intention in Dinah’s and De Becque’s statements. This irony is omitted from the adaptations, which only show de Becque’s politeness to his servant, Henry, and Henry’s affection for the children.

Bloody Mary, however, unlike the novel’s unnamed Tonkinese laborers, is the

Tonkinese character in both the novel and in adaptation that tries to escape being a victim of white domination and privilege. Her famously shrill cackle and haggling with the men on the base originates in the script’s stage directions, which says she’ll be associated with it throughout the musical. It has become her signature voice in the public’s imagination of her in a version of the Orientalized stereotype. But it also represents her drive to escape her victimhood since she always wins the negotiations for her goods. The critical colonialist underpinning, however, in both the novel and the adaptations, is that the

Americans have orchestrated the haggling game and her comic delivery of expletives, let alone her success in even setting up shop, despite the supposed protestations of the 46

Captain. Although it is a boon for Bloody Mary’s livelihood, the haggling game provides a steady diet of much needed hilarity for the men, who might otherwise see her Otherness as revolting. For example, the men transform the thought of her betel juice stained mouth from disgust into parody in the song about her in which they coin the epithet of her name:

MEN. Bloody Mary’s chewing betel nuts,

She’s always chewing betel nuts,

Bloody Mary’s chewing betel nuts—

And she don’t use Pepsodent.

(She grins and shows her betel-stained teeth.)

Now aint’ that too damn bad!

(Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan 20)

Like a carnival sideshow, Bloody Mary represents an item of curiosity that the men have commodified as daily theatrical entertainment for their amusement. The lyrics and dialogue where she is first introduced in the script represent how she is used by and even theatrically directed by the Seabees, sailors, and marines for their own entertainment:

MEN. Bloody Mary is the girl I love, (repeated twice)—

Now aint’ that too damn bad!

Her skin is as tender as DiMaggio’s glove, (repeated twice)—

Now aint’ that too damn bad!

MARY. Hallo, G .I!. . . Grass skirt? Very saxy! Fo’ dolla’? You 47

like? You buy? .. .Where you go? Come back! Chipskate!

Crummy G.I.!

MARINE. Tell ‘em good, Mary!

MARY. What is good?

MARINE. Tell him he’s a stingy bastard!

MARY. Stingy bastard! That good?

MARINE. That’s great, Mary! You’re learning fast.. . .

(She laughs very loud but the Marines, Seabees and sailors laugh louder

and cheer her. They then resume their serenade.)

(Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan 18-19)

The song, “Bloody Mary,” sung and danced to by the men, is a seemingly jovially comic vaudeville-style number that sounds like the singsong of children teasing one another. But it is clear Bloody Mary is following the men’s lead; they even out-laugh her to further dominate her according to the stage directions. However, Bloody Mary demonstrates opposition to their Orientalizing projections through comedy by donning the mask of the “Dragon Lady” in her struggle between the identities of the colonized object and of a self-contained entrepreneurial subject. Similarly, minorities in American culture often survive by exploiting rather than subverting stereotypes and banalities (Ma,

Preface xix).

The novel humanizes Bloody Mary’s character by the fact that Cable, a well- educated man, regularly seeks out her company for conversations about the world, which 48

they conduct in French. Given his white privilege, he does not have to seek her out for any type of conversation, even if she is Liat’s mother. An additional fact related to her complexity in the novel that is not included on the stage or screen is when the narrator explains love, sex, and marriage in the Tonkin culture as follows:

I can’t marry her,” Cable repeated sullenly. “You don’t love her?” Mary

asked, using a word that had no exact counterpart in Tonkinese, where

men and women marry for almost any reason except love. It was a

western extravagance whose meaning had once been explained to her by

Benoit, the planter who wanted to marry Liat. (Michener 212).

This insight into Bloody Mary’s culture provides critical context that humanizes her machinations to find Liat an economically solvent husband. There is text in Michener’s autobiography that contextualizes the above passage from the novel where he describes being sent to investigate why some entire units of American servicemen did not want to leave the islands of Upolu and Bora-Bora after the threat of invasion no longer existed.

He reports that the Polynesian islanders invited the American soldiers to live in their native frond-covered platform homes to have sex with their daughters. The Polynesians not only had a different cultural attitude towards sex and love compared to the

Americans, but Michener mentions the prestige accrued to island women and their families who obtained additional food, money, and other army supplies that accompanied sexual partners of white American servicemen. If a half-white baby was involved, these benefits increased. 49

Although Bloody Mary and Liat are Tonkinese and not Polynesian, they fit the paradigm of cultural difference in contrast to Western values about sex, love, marriage, and childbearing, as well as intermarriage and miscegenation. The notion of Bloody Mary as a “Dragon Lady” who procures her own daughter is challenged by the likelihood that these ideas are Western projections onto Tonkinese culture. The Tonkinese cultural context of marriage as pragmatic and not romantic, or different from the West, is lost in adaptation. Its loss seems to support the case for the legacy of Bloody Mary’s character as a stereotypical, cold, cunning procuress and therefore as a “Dragon Lady” on stage and screen in a more culturally conservative image of the Other. But in yet another proof of

Bloody Mary’s complexity, she offers to financially support Joe and Liat in China, which originates in the novel and is retained in the musical:

MARY. Lootellan, you like Liat.. . . Marry Liat! You have good life

here. Look, Lootellan, I am rich. I save six hundred dolla’ before war.

Since war I make two thousand dolla’ . . . war go on I make maybe

more. . . . Give all de money to you an’ Liat. You no have to work. I

work for you ... (Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan 120).

The irony about the claim of Bloody Mary as a procuress in adaptation is that she finds a romantic Western love in Cable for Liat, rather than a realistic, stable economic partner in the context of her own cultural norms, and she offers to financially support the couple. Bloody Mary's choice of Cable indicates that she wants to change her and her daughter’s colonialist subservience by symbolically joining with the imperial power, the 50

only route she can see to nonexploitation. But more significantly as a mother, she also wants a truly good man for Liat and is genuinely interested in Liat's happiness. Bloody

Mary only uses the exploitative, alcoholic Jacques Benoit, as a ploy in her machinations for Cable. If Bloody Mary were not concerned with Liat's emotional happiness, she would have simply engaged Liat to Benoit, a wealthy planter, and not bothered with

Cable, which would have signified her as a procuress.

After the news of Cable's death in the musical and the movie, the devastated

Bloody Mary runs over to Nellie with the sobbing Liat and sadly says Liat won't marry anyone but Cable:

MARY. Where is Lootellan Cable?

NELLIE. Who are you?

MARY. I am mother of Liat... .She won’t marry no one

but Lootellan Cable. (LIAT walks on slowly. MARY moves her

forward and shows her to NELLIE. NELLIE looks at the girl

and realizes who she is. . . . NELLIE rushes to her impulsively

and embraces her.) (Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan, 159).

In addition to proving Benoit is merely part of her leverage to get Cable to marry

Liat, this scene reveals a key moment in adaptation when Bloody Mary takes off the tough mask needed for survival and instead, as a mother, expresses true emotion in her face and voice. It is also one of the few moments Bloody Mary is not with any of the

American servicemen where she must play a role to survive; rather, she is reaching out to 51

another woman. This vulnerable moment of Bloody Mary’s in the Drury Lane film of the original musical is emotionally genuine as is the moment in the 2008 revival.

Bloody Mary’s moment of despair on behalf of Liat’s tragedy, however, is also not material spectators associate with her, as they do her shrieked profane epithets such as "Stingy Bastard.” She is seen as a stereotype despite the fact that, as Geoffrey Block points out, her hurled expletives are toned down in number for the musical and sanitized the furthest in the movie, which instead uses "Stingy Stinker" due to Hollywood

Production Code requirements (152). The movie’s sanitized language dulls the sharp layer of gravity underlying Bloody Mary’s feigned gaiety as she learns her lines for the little drama she daily reenacts to entertain and make a living. Although the Code resulted in obvious conservative language changes, these changes affect the shift to a more culturally conservative representation of the Other as South Pacific travels from the stage to the screen, since the changes tone down the subtext of vital anger underneath the comedy in which the Other decries her object status.

While Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan may have intended to capture the some of the irony and complexity in Bloody Mary’s character from the novel, the increased stakes and comedy reflected on the musical stage at this time seem to perpetuate what

Bloody Mary signifies in the public imagination as the more one-dimensional “Dragon

Lady” on stage. She also seems to live on this way in analyses in some recent scholarship as cited above. In this sense, the musical is also more conservative than the novel with its complexity in relation to Bloody Mary. In the light of postcolonial 52

discourse, such changes can also be read as an amplification of the paradox of her character’s meaning as both stereotypic and complex, suggesting respectively, the conservative and liberal tensions emblematic of the Cold War and postwar triumphalist cultures.

Historic and cultural shifts are also evident in the representation of the trajectory of Bloody Mary’s trademark “bloody” or reddish betel-stained teeth and mouth in adaptation. In the first graphic description in the novel, Bloody Mary has a few

"funereally black" teeth along with "four thin ravines running out from the corners of her mouth" that are usually filled with betel nut juice that "makes her look as if her mouth had been dashed by a rusty razor" (Michener 170). This is a cultural distinction that is also toned down in the pathway to the midcentury stage and screen as corroborated by

Block. Although the stains are referenced in the song “Bloody Mary," when made up for the role, Juanita Hall's teeth and chin are clean. Aside from darker lipstick, Bloody Mary has none of the reddish tinge of the stains in the original Broadway production photos, the Drury Lane film, or in the movie. By not showing the stains and rivulets of the juice on her face in the original production and movie, Bloody Mary is rendered less Asian and more Western compared to the novel. Perhaps too presumably ghoulish a face in the original production and the movie might have jeopardized Bloody Mary’s character as initially comedic, although Pacific veterans would have associated it with chewing betel nuts. In the context of this analysis of the adaptation process, there is irony in sanitizing the stains and rivulets. The adaptations suggest that while Bloody Mary’s face is clean, 53

her interior soul is still dirty, yet at the same time they reduce the humanity she’s provided in the novel. However, the stains are authentically represented in the 2008 revival according to the 2010 live televised broadcast, although without the novel’s rivulets. This represents a liberal shift in cultural values related to “Asians-as-Other,” reflecting changing history in the distance since the war and the demographics of ethnicity in America. Postcolonial theory absorbed and reflected these changes, and in turn may have also influenced such a change in representation on the stage.

It is ironic that an African American, Juanita Hall, was chosen to play an Asian character Bloody Mary in the context of midcentury racial prejudice towards blacks. The musical debuted about three years after the war ended or in close proximity to it. Hall probably met other requirements for the character, including her voice and short stout physique. But it can only be speculated that perhaps casting an African American actor was less fraught than casting an Asian actor so soon after the war, particularly in New

York, where black-white racial tensions, although present, were not quite as high as in the South or other parts of the country.

Another ironic aspect of casting Hall is related to her physique. Although it fits

Bloody Mary’s character as the opposite of the temptress “Dragon Lady” stereotype of a tall thin Eurasian of the delicate Western aesthetic of beauty — as in the comic strip and in Anna May Wong’s movie images — Wong, the initial choice for the role in the

Broadway production, dropped out for health reasons. Wong would have increased the

Bloody Mary’s “Dragon Lady” stereotype in this respect. However, Frances Nguyen, 54

who played Liat in the original musical and who is part French and part Vietnamese, fits the delicate Eurasian description of the “Dragon Lady” construction’s complementary stereotype of the “Butterfly.” Particularly after it is adapted from the novel to the stage and screen, this chapter concurs with scholars such as Andrea Most, Beidler, Prasso, and

Ma who largely address the musical, contending that Liat fits the stereotypical

“Butterfly” construction.

Liat's lack of substance and spoken lines in the musical and movie diverge from the novel where she is an educated adolescent who is fluent in and speaks exquisite

French. What Liat says in the novel indicates a person with insight and maturity for her age, individuating her character. She also stands up for what she wants, including when she points out Joe’s prejudice, thinking this is why he won’t take her to lunch with the

French nuns. Liat’s native sophistication is exemplified in the novel when Cable tells her he cannot marry her:

With the rare indifference bred of a thousand years of life in the Orient,

the little girl said quietly, “I knew it could never be. My mother dreamed

that something great would happen to me. It has. But not what she

dreamed. You love me. You will go away somewhere. I will marry

somebody else... . Oh, yes! I shall. My family is almost rich among the

Tonkinese.. . . But I wish that you and I could have a baby. A baby that

was yours, too. Then, if you went away . . .

(Michener 215). 55

The narrator’s comment about “rare indifference” suggests a questionable Western or

Orientalized projection onto “the little girl” from “the Orient.” However, the point about

Liat is that in adaptation, she is not only robbed of her fluency of exquisite French by just speaking “un peu,” but she speaks only ten additional words in the entire script in the scene in the hut when she first meets Cable, most of which are “yes,” “no,” and “my mother.” In adaptation from the novel, Liat represents a conservative shift in racial configuration.

Andrea Most and Beidler point out the fact that Rodgers and Hammerstein interwove “Our Heroine” with “’Fo’ Dolla’” in order to avoid a reprise of Madama

Butterfly as is often quoted in the criticism of Rodgers and Hammerstein and South

Pacific. However, the two scholars persuasively argued that the interweaving of the two stories doesn’t mitigate the Orientalized “Puccini kill-the-courtesan model” as Beidler put it (50). Instead, they said interweaving the stories merely reorganizes the stereotypical outcome. Andrea Most contended that when Joe miscegenates and is killed off because he realizes the problematic nature of his behavior, Liat is left as “the exotic sexual object who is not supposed to talk“ as the muted bereft “Butterfly” (Most 160). She also aptly points out that giving Liat a true voice in the musical and marrying her to Cable would be

"openly and powerfully advocating miscegenation in an American society that was still deeply committed to racially separate spheres" (Most 160). History confirms the taboo against Asian-white intermarriage in the U.S.. Just a few Japanese women came to the

U.S. under The War Brides Act of 1945, with many more arriving as of 1952 under the 56

McCarran-Walters Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (Lee, 162). But it wasn’t until 1967 in Loving v. Virginia that the Supreme Court “unanimously and emphatically voided laws prohibiting interracial marriage as a deprivation of liberty as well as a denial of equal protection” (Spaeth, 135).

When Liat’s brief but clear representation as a subject in the novel is completely lost in adaptation, belief in Cable's emotional struggle about taking her back to the

Philadelphia Mainline as his wife strains credulity compared to the novel in which they are able to communicate verbally through her fluent and his excellent French. That said, music plays a major function in the musical and the movie by communicating emotion that the novel form communicates in text. While “Younger Than Springtime,” a quintessential sweet romantic song of young lovers that Cable sings to Liat after they meet in the hut and have sex for the first time, works as a love-at-first-sight type of song on the face of it, it also suggests a deeper poignancy for midcentury and likely for modern audiences.

At the heart of the song is the yearning of a young soldier in a terribly violent, challenging war straining to make it through alive. While the novel is seemingly more credible with regard to Cable’s love and lust for Liat, or at least in relation to the adaptation, which seems to be mostly about lust sanitized as love, both the stage and screen versions of the musical still succeed in movingly communicating the essential humanity of young men in great danger in a war far from home. In this moment, the emotional poignancy contained in the song suggests that Cable feels he is truly in love 57

with Liat, given his proximity to death on the imminent dangerous mission. In the context of the music, Liat’s object status in adaptation seems to soften and her openness to him seems more believable. But on balance, this does not mitigate the musical’s more conservative representation of Liat compared to that of the novel.

Cable’s death in the novel is complicated by fierce guilt-ridden “throwing himself into battle” style self-destruction related to his guilt about Liat. Missing from both the musical and the movie is this more “Ordinary Man-as-hero” death alongside others in the beachhead battle as in the novel. Although not adapted, while his implied racial guilt in the scene in the novel is powerful, its emotional content is perceptible underneath the anger in the lyrics and music of the song “Carefully Taught” in the musical and the movie. The music has a percussive quality of hammering home Cable’s painful lesson that he is prejudiced and must change this destructive attitude. The song and preceding text suggest his painful epiphany:

CABLE. It’s not bom in you! It happens after you’re bom . . .(CABLE

sings the following words, as if figuring this whole question out for the

first time)

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,

You’ve got to be taught from year to year,

It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear — ...

You’ve got to be carefully taught! . . .

Of people whose eyes are oddly made, 58

And people whose skin is a different shade — ...

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate —

(Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan 136)

"Carefully Taught" is the musical's most direct address to race, capturing the novel’s authorial voice on the issue. The tension between Cable's newfound insights about his own prejudice as well as America's entrenched prejudice "bursts out in the musical's anthem” (Most 5). The song argues for Rodgers and Hammerstein's liberal democratic worldview. Andrea Most also suggests that when Cable bursts into the song, he is born anew, reinventing himself based on his epiphany. The stage directions indicate this immediately after the song. Cable says to de Becque, “(. . . his voice is filled with the emotion o f discovery and firm in a new determination) .. .if I get out of this thing alive, I’m not going back there! I’m coming here. All I care about is right here. To hell with the rest” (Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan 137). As the musical’s anthem, the song also reflects Nellie’s epiphany, in addition to Cable’s shame and guilt over having fallen in love with Liat and not being able to marry her. Cable sings the song in response to how he sees his own prejudice mirrored in the pain that Nellie’s prejudice has caused

Emile.

Cable miscegenates, but he is killed off, unable to do what he hopes by putting into action what he has learned about his own prejudice. In adaptation, his heroic military death seems to mitigate his inability to be morally heroic in relation to race, 59

particularly within the context of Cable’s Philadelphia upper-crust strata. Such moral heroism refers to the sense of being able to take the major risk of stateside social ostracism in breaking strong taboos about intermarriage and mixed-race progeny. While there was a good deal of interracial sex in the Pacific war, the novel also depicts the interracial marriages of white officers who marry De Becque’s daughters and remain alive. In the novel, these minor characters are not killed off after their marriages to their respective Eurasian and Polynesian partners, unlike the novel’s Cable, Tony, and

Anderson. But the stage musical and movie significantly kill off the one white American who miscegenates, without representing any interracial marriages.

Beidler contended that the South Pacific adaptation process commodifies

America’s role in World War II as collective myth. This means that the midcentury adaptations met the needs of American popular desire to celebrate victory and to imagine itself heroically and romantically healing from a triumphant but horrible war. In this sense, the public would be thrilled to witness Cable conflated with Anderson’s war heroism, which further ennobles their postwar victory. Outside of a smaller liberal audience, they would be less thrilled if he were to have brought Liat home as his wife.

Integration, let alone routine intermarriage, was not yet historic in the U.S.. Events like

Brown v. Board of Education; Montgomery, Alabama; the Birmingham riots; and Little

Rock entered the historical arena five years after the Broadway musical’s debut. Instead, the South Pacific adaptations create cultural legend about “the Good War” that was victorious over totalitarianism, fascism, and racism overseas, while treading carefully in 60

raising the issue of race that was about to ignite at home. In this way, the play creates legend in how it combines victory and Cold War cultures around the conservative or conformist idea of white American nation, while at the same time introducing the individual rights of the Other.

The conservative aspect of the fifties’ paradox as amplified in adaptation is related to the internal threat to liberals during the McCarthy period of the Cold War.

Rodgers and Hammerstein resisted intense pressure during tryouts to remove the song

“Carefully Taught” from the musical because it was controversial (Rodgers 261). One critic said it "sounds smug" (Durgin A-19). Another said," 'SP' is not the show for a preachment about racial inequality and prejudice. Cable is not the sort of young man, who, however, unhappy, would sing it" (Hughes). Rodgers and Hammerstein were ardent and outspoken patriots. However, in addition to their both being connected with a liberal social agenda through their affiliations, the FBI had opened a file on Rodgers, which might have “raise [d] suspicions among those who claimed to be exposing

Communists” (Most 172). Related to a touring production of South Pacific in Atlanta in

1953, Rodgers and Hammerstein were tacitly Red-baited for their decision to keep the song. As a result, some Georgia legislators introduced a bill to outlaw entertainment that had, as they put it, “ ‘an underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow’ ” (Most 154). In reference to “Carefully Taught,” Georgia State Representative David C. Jones claimed “a song justifying interracial marriage was implicitly a threat to the American way of life”

(Most 153). 61

For the purposes of this analysis of race, this chapter argues that the specifically

Polynesian-white color divide depicted in the novel and the adaptations represented by

Nellie’s story is a result of and reflects the black-white racial divide in midcentury

American culture. The specificity of the translation from dark-skin Polynesian to African

American is heard in Nellie's blatantly racist slur about de Becque's Polynesian mate and their children. As such, it represents Nellie’s reference point for racial Otherness as limited to African American. Here is Nellie's famous reaction to the children in the novel:

. . . before her were other indisputable facts! Emile de Becque, not

satisfied with Javanese and Tonkinese women, had also lived with the

Polynesian. A nigger! To Nellie's tutored mind any person living or dead

who was not white or yellow was a nigger.. . . Her entire Arkansas

upbringing made it impossible for her to deny the teachings of her youth. .

.. He had nigger children.. . . they would be her stepdaughters.

(Michener 138).

On stage and screen, by contrast, this text is instead sanitized by the use of an ellipsis to preclude the use of the novel’s racist word, when Nellie says the following:

“And . . . their mother .. . was a . . . was . . . a ..., “ (Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan

106). The use of the ellipsis in the musical was likely the result of the overtly liberal political risk of the ironic slur as used in the novel. The slur is ironic in the novel because the authorial voice is not prejudicial; it reveals the character’s prejudice, and by 62

extension, the culture’s racism and prejudice. In the musical, the ellipsis was probably used at the time because it tempered the loaded use of novel’s ironical slur — loaded in the sense that its irony could be contested given the controversy over race, even though

Michener likely intended it as ironic. However, the ellipsis in the musical still functioned as a form of irony since midcentury audiences, particularly liberal New York audiences, likely knew that the implied word was meant as a protest of racism in Rodgers’s and

Hammerstein’s voices. In the movie, the ellipsis appears to further reduce the irony such that it seems like de Becque is finishing Nellie’s sentence, instead of Nellie stumbling over the missing racist word. Further proving the likelihood of the irony of the ellipsis in the musical, the Hollywood Production Code censored it, demanding its excision from the evolving movie script as cited in James Lovensheimer’s analysis because it was too overtly political.

Other songs in the musical besides “Carefully Taught” adapt the novel’s depiction and America’s issues of the black-white divide, adding to the ironic message inherent in the ellipsis. The musical’s opening moment of de Becque’s bi-racial children singing

“Dites-Moi” is about how wonderful it is to be in love and feel loved. The song provides a strong positive emotional anchor for the representation of Emile’s mixed-race children as the product of miscegenation, and as young, lovely, innocent humanity that is then reprised in the closing frame. The children and their song foreshadow Nellie’s transformation and their future with their new loving adoptive mother in addition to their father’s newfound happiness. The song “A Cockeyed Optimist” also functions to 63

promote human fellowship, particularly in Nellie’s following lines that foreshadow her as the agent of healing and change: “NELLIE. I hear the human race / Is falling on its face

And hasn’t very far to go, / But every whippoorwill / Is selling me a bill / And telling me it just isn’t so!” (Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan 8).

On the other hand, the song, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” has military images in addition to “wash him out,” including “ tear it up! . . . I Push him out, fly him out! /... Cancel him . . . / Ride than man right off your range, / Rub him out the roll call, / And drum him out your dreams!” (72-73). In this song, Nellie tries to talk herself out of being in love with a man with secrets including his criminal past. But the song also suggests Nellie’s central obstacle as well as that of the musical, which is foreshadowed in the opening scene. This suggests the song’s additional meaning that miscegenation may not be clean given Nellie’s imminent initial reaction to the fact of de

Becque’s children.

Block contends that when the movie removes the stage’s humorous pantomime

Emile does mocking Nellie’s “Wash That Man” routine immediately before he introduces her to his bi-racial children, any semblance of humor to blunt the shock of the news is lost (152). This analysis argues further that the loss of the humor suggests greater gravity about the fact of their race, and therefore as a more culturally conservative change in the film compared to the stage, where the humor in Emile’s action is meant to underscore the fallacy of prejudice. 64

From today's perspective in contrast to the midcentury, however, Nellie's narrative of prejudice in the novel, musical, and movie appears to diffuse the threat of black-white intermarriage and its product of mixed-race progeny because it is an indirect choice. Nellie will adopt mixed-race Polynesian-white children, but not have them; she will presumably have one or more white children with de Becque. Today, this suggests that for the midcentury, white “purity” was retained, thwarting any overt or latent reader and spectator prejudice among those who might have felt at the time that this would threaten white American identity. The message seems to be that it was acceptable at the time to help improve the moral problem of racism and prejudice by adopting or parenting and loving mixed-race children, but not to intentionally conceive mixed-race children in mixed-race unions.

Cold War scholar Bruce McConachie makes the compelling case that American liberals made assimilation more urgent than before because they were embarrassed by racism in the U.S., which was instead putting vast resources into containment.

McConachie persuasively argues that South Pacific represents “containment liberalism” as a response to race in the Cold War (140). From this viewpoint, according to

McConachie, Nellie’s adoption of two mixed-race children represents a way for liberals to support anti-communism and humanitarian relief to children by expanding their family circles (144). His point is that Nellie’s new family, like the fifties’ bunkered suburban and television families, legitimated “the ‘family values’ of containment liberalism,” by not straying outside the bounds of same-race marriage (140). Notably, Hammerstein 65

adopted an Asian child and Michener approached him to support Pearl Buck’s Welcome

House, which Michener had started to facilitate adoptions of mixed-race Asian-western children. However, Nellie’s narrative remains at the heart of the success of the musical’s transformative lesson about racial justice since she represents a liberal leap forward for the times.

How Nellie’s transformative lesson is transmitted in each staging and screening of

South Pacific matters. The form of the stage or the screen as opposed to the text significantly vitiates the way the choice of representing race is perceived in the adaptation process. In the novel, the color of De Becque's eight daughters is described in a hierarchy from “golden complexions” and as “beautiful as only Eurasians can be”

(Michener 137) for the lighter daughters whose beauty Nellie admires, to the darker daughters who, by contrast, horrify her. In adaptation, de Becque only has two children who are lighter in color. On stage and screen, Ngana and Jerome are configured as de

Becque’s lighter skin children, looking more like the novel’s less threatening “Eurasian” beauties with the “golden complexion[s].” They are not configured as his darkest skinned progeny like in the novel. This dilutes the impact of Nellie’s reference point for racial difference as black-white and its reflection of racist attitudes towards African Americans.

Casting and makeup choices on stage and screen represent important modes of reproducing and interpreting the cultural politics of race, particularly in this musical where the issue of how midcentury Americans actually “saw” African-American racial difference is central. On stage, the fact of character embodiment offers the chance to 66

commit to a specific choice of darkness in skin color when casting de Becque's children in order to show what Nellie “saw.” Instead, the midcentury adaptations diffuse bolder choices as clearly described in the novel. Furthermore, the children’s charming, educated

French language, culture, and manners further tilt their identity towards white European ethnicity rather than towards Polynesian as the black Other. Together, the choice of skin tone and white colonialism diffuse the already diluted image of Nellie’s adapting mixed- race children, although she will marry an Other to the extent that Emile is French.

The opposite, however, is true in the bold casting of Bloody Mary as an African

American in the original Broadway production. Although Bloody Mary’s doubling

Otherness as black and Asian does not signify the musical’s concern with miscegenation and its progeny, it effectively represents the marginalization of both races and more deeply critiques U.S. racism at home. From a Cold War and postwar victory cultural perspective, the original musical represents the paradox of liberal and conservative tensions of the fifties in the contradiction between killing off Cable — the bridge to the

Other — as the miscegenator, and in casting Hall as Bloody Mary. It also reflects Cold

War and postwar victory cultural polarities in the tension between the representation of the miscegenating Cable who is punished with death and cannot transform, although he can learn, and Nellie, who can transform, albeit within limits, and presumably will flourish.

The other important representations of the cultural politics of the black-white divide in America represented in the novel that bear on the adaptation process are as 67

follows: de Becque's ethnicity and his waiting to marry someone white; Luther Billis's transgression of his whiteness through identification with the dark-skinned native Other; black-white segregation in the military, and the stereotypical images of the African

American cemetery guards as the final image of the novel. Although Michener is careful to point out that De Becque respects his former partners of color, the fact that De Becque does not marry any of these mothers of his children and instead waits to marry a white woman is conservative, although he represents transformation to the extent that he loves and parents his mixed-race children. But a wealthy French colonialist like De Becque had access to women of other cultures without having to marry them. He could wait and marry a young white woman with whom to have additional children as he alludes to wanting with Nellie. In adaptation, de Becque has had only one dark-skinned Polynesian mate with whom he had children and who is conveniently no longer alive, obviating this aspect of his white colonialist male privilege as in the novel. Additionally, de Becque, who reads Marcel Proust and Anatole France, appears not to assimilate much of

Polynesian or Tonkinese cultures, except for the fact of his sexual partner (partners in the novel), his children's genetics, and one of their names.

De Becque also inhabits significant insider spheres of cultural influence in the novel as the patronizing colonialist before he becomes thoroughly transformed as an insider in the adaptations’ denouement. In adaptation, his questionable criminal past killing a town bully in France in self-defense becomes a legitimized accident and a badge of anti-fascist bravery that Captain Brackett and Cable leverage by getting de Becque to 68

agree to participate in the secret mission. Although de Becque survives the mission and

Cable does not, the interweaving of the two stories in adaptation positions him as a legendarily brave World War II hero along with Cable, further ennobling his humanitarian liberalism in loving and supporting his mixed-race children.

Luther Billis, on the other hand, is distinctively represented in the novel through his respectful identification with the nonwhite native Other, which shifts radically in adaptation. Rodgers says this about the evolution of Luther Billis's character and the interweaving of "Fo Dolla'" and "Our Heroine":

.. .[a]ll this was against the accepted rules of musical-play construction.

If the main love story is serious, the secondary romance is usually

employed to provide comic relief... .But in South Pacific there are two

serious themes, with the second becoming a tragedy when young Cable is

killed during the mission. Breaking the rules didn't bother us, but we did

think the show needed comic leavening, so we went to still a third story

for an affable wheeler dealer named Luther Billis .. . (Rodgers 259).

Luther Billis's ardent identification with the Vanicoro natives, considered the most “savage” of those in the South Pacific islands in the novel, is an image of social and cultural enlightenment that is completely inverted by comedy in the adaptation process.

In the novel, Billis is fluent in Beche Le Mer and knows other Pacific Islands languages.

He is an honorary inductee into the Vanicoro tribe and wears an affirming tattoo among other extensive body tattoos along with the boar bracelet; such bracelets were highly 69

valued in the New Hebrides (Maslon 83). He sports a deep brown suntan along with a profusion of tattoos, native jewelry, and flowers. His slave bracelet engraved with his name further links his identification with the natives to the image of Otherness in

American slavery and racism, in addition to its parodying his lowly Seabee status.

Billis’s significant identification with Pacific native islanders, however, gets omitted, diluted, or subverted into parody in the musical compared to its representation in the novel.

The ritual described in "A Boar's Tooth" in the novel is not a parody of native culture as it is in the adaptations. However, the story’s tone, could for some readers, easily slip into tones of piety and patronage because of the minister’s extensive anthropological explanation. Also, the care the narrator takes to avoid any humor in the description of the ceremony suggests overly cautious tones in a novel where hilarity is rife and well juxtaposed to the period’s anxieties of confronting Otherness and the horrors and poignancies of war. But there is one touch of humor at the end of the boar story when the Americans, back on their boat, drolly consider the gifts of the fresh bloody tusks. The musical, in contrast, briefly refers to the Vanicoro boar ceremony as an action that occurs offstage, and is described only through Billis's comic remark to

Bloody Mary while he waits for Cable to join him to go back the base:

BILLIS. "Hey, Mary — Please ask those Boar Tooth ceremonial fellows

not to be sore at me. I didn't think those girls would do a religious 70

dance with only skirts on. If somebody had told me it was a religious

dance, I wouldn't have gotten up and danced with them ..."

(Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan 96)

With regard to stage images, the original Broadway production and the 1951 film of the

London production follow the script and leave it out, merely suggesting the ceremony with tasteful images of nonthreatening looking or lighter-hued natives walking across the stage. The 2008 Broadway revival reprises the original production in this respect.

The 1958 movie, on the other hand, does a parody of the ceremony as if through

Billis's perception of it as novelty and entertainment. The movie's parody implies that the ritual and its culture is somewhere between the ludicrous and the barbaric to comically signal Billis's sexual frustration. Although the Hollywood Production Code excised the movie script's more salacious description of the ceremony, Logan managed to suggest

Billis' eager anticipation (Block 158). Two movie critics at the time called this scene

"dubious" and a "vulgar disturbance," which instead most likely and ironically referred to insinuated sex rather than to the vulgarity of the representation of race in the ceremony

(Scheuer, Crowther).

In the original production, in addition to Billis’s “gone native” tanned, tattooed and be-flowered look, he only wears a metal necklace with an abstract native design and the boar bracelet, apparently not a slave bracelet like in the novel, which is the most transgressive of the images of identification with the Other. Also, his only noticeable tattoo on the stage and in the movie is the large triple mast schooner on his stomach that 71

he comically maneuvers in belly-rolls in the Thanksgiving Follies. This tattoo humorously suggests an image of “Old Ironsides,” the USS Constitution, a famous naval frigate during the American Revolution that won more sea battles than any other early

American ship of its kind, now a museum relic in Boston Harbor. This notion stems from the fact that the naval base’s top officer, Captain Brackett, is referred to in the musical as

“Iron Belly” (45). The belly-rolling ship tattoo is comically subversive. But it could also be read paradoxically as the opposite or the more conservative choice compared to the radical image of Otherness implied in Billis’s Vanicoro tribe membership tattoo.

The adaptations depict as comic Billis's Western appetite for the novelty of the exotic non-Western Other. In the novel, this is more gently comic since Billis does not lower his power status to buy the boar tusk bracelet as in the musical, which he buys at an extorted rate; it is a gift in the novel. But as the buffoon in the adaptations, Billis can’t help himself from lowering his status to buy such items, turning his objective into the representation of a leer at native culture as entertainment and the fetishized accumulation of their icons as collectibles. For example, in the musical, Bloody Mary’s first offer to

Billis for the sale of her boar bracelet is that it costs a hundred dollars. But instead of bargaining as he always does, the stage directions indicate he pays without a fight:

“(Shocked, but realizing he will pay it, turns to the boys and justifies himself in advance.)

That’s cheap, I thought it would be more” (Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Logan 26).

Although similar to the revolutionary warship tattooed on Billis’s stomach, this could 72

also be understood as subversive. However, it was likely not seen as that in the midcentury when native culture was often perceived as “savage.”

In the movie, in addition to a similar dynamic as the musical in relation to the bracelet, Billis also calls Bloody Mary a “Dragon Lady.” The level of Billis's dismissal of the Tonkinese and their culture is even more acute in the movie when in response to

Cable's inquiry about Bloody Mary, Billis says, "She's nothing. She's Tonkinese," which he doesn’t say in the novel or musical ( South Pacific 1958).

Billis’s adapted character also represents class tensions in relation to Cable, which seem less sharp on stage and screen than in the novel, given Billis’s role as the buffoon in the musical and movie. Adaptation makes texts available to new audiences "via the processes of proximation and updating” (Sanders 19). By adapting the character of Billis as a buffoon character rather than as the genuinely native identified Seabee as in the novel, his character may have been more accessible to postwar audiences in a way that was similar to war buffoon characters as comic heroes in nostalgic comedies soon to emerge after South Pacific. These subsequent war buffoons appeared in movies like

Operation Petticoat (1959), also adapted as a television series, and the 1960’s television sitcoms Hogan’s Heroes and McHale ’s Navy.

Andrea Most’s statement is persuasive when she says that through Billis’s performance style in the musical, he can be recognized as a working class "sanitized ethnic comic" (168). His speech in the script and his accent in the Drury Lane production as well as in the 2008 revival suggest that he is probably a New York or northeastern 73

city-styled tough guy character, and likely Christian as a “Luther.” Billis's unstated ethnic identity keeps the focus tightly on Nellie’s and Cable's race narratives and removes the political risk of ethnic stereotyping. It also simplifies his character’s function as comic relief. Additionally, it suggests America as a melting pot reminiscent of wartime recruitment propaganda about military social inclusion in the “Americans All” campaign and other Office of War Information rhetoric that supposedly celebrated America’s ethnic and religious diversity. Furthermore, Billis's sidekick, Hyman Weinstein, the one Jewish character adapted from the novel’s two Jews, and whose name is ethnically identifying, is not ethnically specified in adaptation as it is in the novel. On stage and screen, the back of Billis's shirt has “Billis” painted on it, but Weinstein's shirt says nothing. Weinstein is merely comically referred in speech as "The Professor," referring to his knowledge of multiple languages.

The most direct image of African Americans in the novel is that of the subordination of African American service men and their separation from whites in the military. The novel accurately represents the fact that blacks fought separately in their own units, with a brief mention of a segregated Black Battalion that was sent to do "the roughest fighting in the Pacific" in the Bougainvilles (Michener 267). African Americans are also briefly mentioned in the novel as cooking for the white military and carrying its weapons and heavy machinery, in addition to guarding its graveyards. "Almost one million African American men and women served courageously in all branches of the armed forces — in segregated departments. . . . Perhaps more than any other event, 74

World War II illuminated the duplicity of state-sponsored racism" (Baker 193).

However, the 1949 musical and the movie each have one black actor in the white Seabees chorus during the song "Nothing Like a Dame." This is a misrepresentation suggesting there was even tokenism when there was only segregation in the military. The 2008 revival succeeds in accurately representing the “separate but equal” policy in the military, and by extension in the nation at the time by staging three black Seabees together as a separate group during "Nothing Like a Dame." Additionally, none of the three black

Seabees do a stereotypical soft-shoe dance as is done in the original.

The novel’s final story, "The Cemetery at Hoga Point,” contains its most striking image of the military's black-white divide in the description of the preacher and Denis, the only two African Americans given dialogue in the novel. Michener's disturbing

Uncle Tom description of the two men includes patronizing racial associated adjectives like "shuffling," "ambling," "dull-eyed," and "a waddle walk" (Michener 379). This is striking because the adjectives describing these characters are through his authorial voice, although his use of dialect could arguably have been a reflection of the actual dialect spoken by such men at the time. Although caricature is not Michener's intent, his use of stereotypical racial associated adjectives is not only a problem of negative stereotyping.

It is a problem because he is also making is a plea for a common humanity related to the two African American men's fears about returning to America to face the battle against racism at home, and as they point out, without the defense of the heroes lying dead in the cemetery at their feet. In the important closing of the novel, Michener's use of negative 75

stereotypes complicates Nellie’s transformation in the novel’s closing message about racial justice as heroism. But while the original musical is more conservative in relation to race than the novel in other ways, it does not represent the Asian or dark-skinned Other in any way analogous to the Uncle Tom description in the novel’s last story. This is particularly the case since this analysis of Bloody Mary argues for her complexity instead of for her character as the stereotypical “Dragon Lady.”

The original musical also has an uncomplicated or clear closing meaning in its circular frame that opens with the two mixed-race children in song and ends with the closing tableau of interracial family unity. In doing so, it maintains the focus on hope for racial equality and tolerance. However, the novel and the original musical, as well as the movie, both ultimately reflect complex midcentury racial ambivalence and conservativism along with liberal representations and transformations in relation to race, reflecting the paradox of the fifties.’ At the same time, the overall adaptation trajectory shows increasing conservativism as the novel travels to the stage and screen, except for the stereotyping at the very end of the novel.

IV. Conclusions

Changing forms, history, and artistic vision were inextricably enmeshed in changing meaning and ideology in the South Pacific adaptation process. Even when fidelity to the source material appears to be broadly present, it is just one of the multiple layers of meaning in the adaptation process. As demonstrated, when the novel travels to 76

the stage and the screen, certain racial representations become more conservative.

Nellie’s ironic racial slur becomes an ellipsis on stage, which is further toned down on the screen. Bloody Mary is no longer deemed worthy of extensive conversation about the world. Her cultural custom of chewing betel nuts is more sanitized in the original stage production and on screen, suggesting that this custom is too unseemly for an American audience. Liat is more objectified on the stage and screen. Cable’s heroic death is sanitized on the screen, but not described in the novel or on stage and so left open to the imagination.

Other conservative changes include when de Becque joins Cable’s mission and becomes a war hero in an image of patriotism instead of crime. The stage omits the novel’s respectful depiction of the boar ritual and instead uses benign looking natives to walk to and fro, while comically revealing Billis’s sexual pursuit of native women and cultural artifacts. The screen further parodies the off-stage reference to the boar ritual through Billis’s eyes as a demeaningly entertaining circus, instead of as the enlightening experience it is portrayed as in the novel.

On the other hand, when history provides the distance with which to reveal the truth in adaptation, changes can represent a more liberal vision. This happened recently in the 2008 revival with the addition of three black Seabees replacing the token in the original, showing the reality of the Jim Crow military. The revival offered a more honest look at race and its implications for America in the fifties because the show was not 77

defensive. As Ben Brantley put it, "[TJhere's not an ounce of we-know-better-now irony in Mr. Sher's staging," (NYT).

Artistic vision can change meaning in various ideological directions. In this instance, it may ironically not be in a liberal direction when the 2008 revival’s added screen curtain texts seemed to more conservatively frame the more liberal frame of the original production. The revival used text from the novel cited earlier about the

“Ordinary Man-as-hero” idea in reference to Anderson, which is inscribed on the opening screen, along with text about the beauty of the South Pacific. The 2008 revival also uses text from the novel cited previously about the idea of nation in America’s three victorious wars and the pathos of how quickly these heroes are forgotten, which is inscribed on its closing screen. In the original musical’s opening scene, the frame was of Jerome and

Ngana playing together on de Becque’s patio, with the closing scene united them with

Nellie and Emile in the tableau of interracial family unity. Alternatively, the revival’s screen curtains seemed to reframe or encircle the musical’s original framing scenes of racial justice in the more conservative image of the idea of nation as military defense and war heroism.

The revival’s addition of these inscribed screens as a frame for its production is intertextual, suggesting a well-earned tribute to Michener's novel, the delights for readers who remember it, as well as its famous trajectory in adaptation. However, the texts printed on the revival’s screen curtains also suggest a curiously ambiguous ideological superimposition over the original musical's balanced frames of racial integration within 78

the family. By encircling the original musical’s frame of racial justice with the novel’s more conservative theme of war heroism, the 2008 revival might inadvertently eclipse the fact that the novel opens with war heroism, but ends with the liberal image of racial justice in the preacher’s plea for reform at home, despite the unfortunate problem with the description of the two graveyard guards. It was disconcerting to read the text referencing war heroism and the idea of nation on these framing screen curtains while considering the fact that Michener's liberal democratic utopian plea for racial justice and a common humanity in his stories, “Our Heroine” and “Fo’Dolla’ ” had become the central theme of the original musical. On the other hand, and in a positive vein, perhaps the revival’s additional frame might suggest one of the paradoxes in 2011, particularly as this study goes to publication. America is embroiled in three wars along with the chronic threat of terrorism that involves the “Arab-as-Other,” and at the same time, we have our first African American president along with other signs of progress in relation to the

Other.

The added screens aside, with the distance we now have from postwar triumphalism and the Cold War, particularly at its height in the fifties, scholars have had time to reflect on how the values of Cold War and victory cultures were represented in theater from the period. This allows us to think about the 2008 revival in new ways.

While this revival continues to show that for its time, the musical revealed the hope for racial justice as shown in the final tableau of integrated family, it simultaneously illuminates the Cold War era’s concern with communist containment. 79

The push-pull or Cold War paradox between liberal and conservative forces through the lens of race has been demonstrated in the key characters in the musical, where liberal is associated with individual rights and conservative is associated with conformity. It is evident in the pull-back of social boundaries in the marginalization and subjugation of Bloody Mary whom the servicemen exploit as the “Asian-as-Other,” while the push-back she represents is in her performance of the colonized survivalist. It is evident in the liberal containment within which Nellie pushes social boundaries by adopting mixed-race children and marries an ethnic Other; while the pulling in of these boundaries is seen in her not miscegenating, with which she is rewarded by her new family. It is seen in Joe Cable who is pulled-back with the ultimate punishment of death for miscegenation, simultaneous to Nellie’s push forward by adopting mixed-race children. It is visible in de Becque’s pull-back in waiting to marry a white woman; but he represents a push forward by loving and supporting his mixed-race children. Billis’s character is paradoxical in the sense that he is the buffoon who simultaneously subverts social boundaries while reinforcing them.

In the end, the South Pacific adaptation process provides a critical window into the cultural politics of race in the 1950s. It illuminates race with increasing conservativism as the page travels to the stage and screen. It also reveals the complexity of postwar triumphalism and the Cold War tensions between conservative conformist and liberal individualist values. In relation to race on the national and global stages today, such values continue to be relevant and contentious. 80

Chapter 2: Mister Roberts

I. Background

Mister Roberts, the 1948 Broadway hit, is not well known today among younger generations, although their grandfathers will probably know a version of it. Adapted from the 1946 popular novel of the same name by Thomas Heggen, the play was written by

Heggen and Joshua Logan, who also directed. Mister Roberts had a lengthy run of just short of three years at the Alvin Theatre with 1,157 performances. It also stimulated the enormously successful 1955 Hollywood movie of the same name. The subsequent twentieth-century adaptations were not successful. They did not garner the critical or commercial acclaim of the original book, play, and movie. The subsequent versions included the 1964 movie sequel, Ensign Pulver; the unsuccessful NBC 1965 television sitcom of only one season, Mister Roberts', and the 1984 NBC Live Theater made-for- television version of the play by the same name.

Although the tragicomic core of the play hit a national nerve in its original successful run, it never had a Broadway revival like its late-1940s Broadway companions set during the war, South Pacific and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Mister Roberts was also produced in 2005 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in

Washington D.C. as part of the Center’s 1940s series, only running for four weeks. This chapter will examine the adaptation process between the novel, the original Broadway play, and the original 1955 Hollywood movie. 81

The contention in this chapter is that complex gender coding in the play, Mister

Roberts, validates conformity at the same time that it stirs up individualistic defiance against it. This illuminates the paradox of the 1950s when conflict simmered beneath received notions of postwar economic and cultural stability. The argument is that protagonist Lieut. Roberts represents the rupture of traditionally gendered masculine liberal individuality when he realizes the error of abandoning the noncombatant crew to satisfy his individual quest for combat. In the play’s resolution, Roberts learns the lesson of the heroism in military conformity for the greater goal of democratic patriotism, even though conformity is traditionally a feminine as well as conservative value. This chapter argues that Roberts’s epiphany becomes associated with the democratized heroism of the noncombatant as the “Ordinary Man” in support of the fight against autocracy as totalitarianism in the Pacific war. Ultimately, the meeting point in the polarities of gender and political polarities gets disrupted when conservative conformity becomes associated with the masculine fraternity of democratized heroism linked to the idea of the “Ordinary

Man.” This chapter also argues that the play amplifies the tensions in these polarities through the higher stakes of hyper-masculinity, particularly in the ramped-up battle between Roberts and the Captain, exceeding the novel’s conservativism. The movie, which is based on the play, includes the play’s amplifications, but it has other conservative features related to the Hollywood Production Code and Navy involvement.

The novel and its adaptations have tragic parallels to Thomas Orlo Heggen’s

(1919-1949) foreshortened life. Tom Heggen’s childhood began well in Fort Dodge, 82

Iowa, although he was a physically frail child. His biographer, John Leggett, describes him as exuberant, clever, competitive, and the family cutup. However, during the

Depression, Heggen’s father, a mild-mannered emotionally remote man, lost his agriculture mortgage loan business along with his self-assurance. He needed to move his family to Oklahoma City to find work. After the move, his son spiraled downwards into despair, mirroring his emotionally distant mother’s reaction. She spun into a deep un­ relenting resentment towards her husband for ruining her good middle-class life.

Depressed, Tom’s schoolwork declined and he barely graduated high school.

In college, inspired by encouragement from his admired first cousin, novelist

Wallace Stegner, Heggen published his first serious short stories. Heggen also gained notoriety on campus as an increasingly sophisticated prankster. Tom rebelled against witless censorship, narrow-minded conformity and representations of parental authority that both attracted and repelled him, according to Leggett. In 1941, he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota, and accepted a job at Reader’s

Digest. Heggen married Carol Lynn Gilmer, a college girlfriend, in what would be a short, disastrous marriage, foreshadowing his subsequently troubled relationships with women.

A few days after Pearl Harbor, Heggen joined the Navy, spending a brief few months as a yeoman, then successfully completing officer training and serving on tankers in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean. He was hospitalized for six of those months due to a hand injury from a fight with another officer. In July, 1944, Heggen got his desired 83

request to transfer to the USS Virgo, an attack cargo and troop ship of the Pacific fleet, ending his unhappy time on prior ships. He felt more at home on the Virgo and remained on it for fourteen months through the war as an assistant communications officer.

Although the Virgo was never in battle, it was not far from danger. The men had to take to their battle stations thirty-two times for air raid alerts while the ship carried marines, gear and mail to islands and destroyers off Guam, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa with its rampant Kamikazes.

In Heggen’s job aboard the Virgo, there was plenty of time to write. Ample incidents supplied Heggen with the themes and virtually all of the comedic scenarios for the stories that would comprise Mister Roberts. Stegner helped Heggen tie the stories together through the character of Roberts and publish them as the novel. Ending the book with Roberts’s transfer to combat duty and his death, “fulfillment and apotheosis in a stroke,” was Heggen’s idea (Leggett 297).

Similar incidents in the novel and adaptations draw upon Heggen’s biography.

These include Captain Morton’s initial denial of the liberty leave; when Roberts throws

Captain Morton’s palm tree overboard; and when Dowdy encourages Roberts and Olson to join Dowdy in tossing the Captain’s replacement trees overboard on the night of

Roberts’ transfer party. In Heggen’s biography, the acutely loathed Herbert Ezra Randall, the Virgo’s Commander, denied the crew’s liberty in San Francisco for the first few days in port. This prompted Heggen and his roommate, Alfred Jones, to shove Randall’s palm tree overboard undetected, along with Randall’s subsequent replacements. According to 84

Leggett, they did this to release their disgust over what they felt was the Commander’s hypocritical expression of his right to individuality in the “vast expanse of military conformity” (288). In a dangerous incident, Jones defied Commander Randall’s orders to switch to full-speed and instead remained at half-speed according to convoy command under darkened-ship precautions. Jones’s defiance averted a near collision with another ship. When Randall threatened to put Jones in confinement to personal quarters for ten days for insubordination, Jones rejoiced, demanding the punishment and resisting the

Commander’s attempts to pardon him, to the delight of Heggen (Leggett, 290). In the novel and play, Roberts similarly taunts Captain Morton to give him ten days in his quarters.

The reviews of the novel were mostly excellent. New York Times said, “Mr.

Heggen has written a little classic. It invites reading aloud; it stirs vivid memories of other captains, other ensigns.. . . reminding] readers that in general, war writing has arrived at a debunking phase” (Leggett 326). The Herald Tribune called it “[some] of the truest and funniest” wartime Navy writing. The New York Post said it “comes very close to being perfect. . . the best novel of the year” (Leggett 326).

The success of the novel led producer Leland Hayward to introduce Heggen to director Joshua Logan, who loved the novel’s theme of the sadness and loneliness of war based on his own Army experience in Europe. Logan also saw that to make the novel a play, it needed unifying dramatic structure. Heggen spent the summer of 1947 at the

Logans’ home eagerly brainstorming with Logan until the script was complete. 85

The tumultuous Broadway opening of Mister Roberts on February 18, 1948, included cheering, weeping, and a long series of curtain calls. The production garnered five Tony Awards, including Best Play for Heggen and Logan, and Best Director for

Logan. David Wayne played Pulver, Robert Keith played Doc, and William Harrigan played the Captain. Henry Fonda won his first Tony for Best Actor as Roberts in a role that became synonymous with the actor himself. Brooks Atkinson of The New York

Times wrote that the play was “a superlatively comic show” where “everything falls into place perfectly” (1948). He also said that thanks to Logan’s direction, none of the theatrical elements were shoddy or hackneyed, compensating for what he saw as the script’s lack of literary value and flimsiness, and its big scene sentimentalities that verge on the maudlin.

John Lardner in the The New Yorker said the play is “the best comedy, the best war play . . . the best new play of any kind . . . this season.” However, Lardner also thought the Captain was too active a villain and he preferred the novel. He said the play does not need “to invent a situation to tie up loose ends,” although he also noted this makes the play “neat and concise” ( The New Yorker). Time magazine’s review with

Logan’s dominant photo was framed by a comment that “as a story and a show, Mister

Roberts was not much and not meant to be, but as a human picture it was magnificent, due largely to coauthor Logan’s brilliantly telling direction” (Leggett 379).

The relationship between Heggen and Logan soured quickly, despite the production’s favorable reviews. Logan had insisted on joint writing credit, claiming that 86

his own ideas strengthened the play and compensated for ideas lacking in the novel.

Heggen began to mistrust Logan, although he had agreed to give Logan the joint credit.

Further sealing Heggen’s fears, he felt Logan had used him and distorted his novel with excessive use of “farce,” comedy that often relies on a highly coincidental plot. Heggen also scorned some of the reviews, such as The New York Times and Time magazine cited above, in which Heggen felt his contributions were reduced in contrast to those of Logan.

Neither psychiatry nor the enormous amount of money Heggen made from the weekly show mitigated Heggen’s inability to start writing again. He descended into further self- destruction related to his utter dependence on Logan for creativity, according to Leggett.

He also felt abandoned by Logan now that Logan was immersed in South Pacific.

Heggen’s body was found submerged in his bathtub on May 19, 1949, with extremely high levels of barbiturates in what was considered a suicide.

Heggen’s legacy would live on in the Hollywood movie when Warner Brothers bought the film rights to the stage play, releasing the movie in 1955, which was nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. The screenplay was by Frank Nugent and Joshua Logan, with co-direction by John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy. Henry Fonda reprised his award-winning role as Mister Roberts. James Cagney played the Captain and

William Powell, the ship’s doctor. Jack Lemmon played Ensign Pulver in an Oscar- winning role for the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. A. H. Weiler’s 1955 review in the The New York Times said the Broadway play has “now emerged 87

triumphantly” from its “justifiably long cruise” on Broadway as a technicolor “trip worth making.. . . capturing the darker as well as the “screamingly funny scenes.. . . ”

The most recent revival in 2005 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing

Arts, Washington D.C., with its brief run in their 1940s retrospective, was seen as “a sweetly subversive opportunity” by Michael M. Kaiser, the Center’s president (Purdum).

Kaiser also said he did not want a radical reinterpretation of a work first noted for its understated realism. Instead, he said he believed “a faithful reintroduction of a play about the pain, boredom, and sacrifice of even a popular war might just make audiences think, ever so gently, about a far more contentious one” (Ibid.).

II. Description of the Novel and Adaptations

The novel is comprised of fifteen untitled mostly interrelated stories or episodes portraying the feuds and pranks of a group of men aboard a fictional U.S. navy cargo ship, the Reluctant, as it sails the backwaters of the Pacific. The time period is the spring of 1945 until a few weeks before the end of the war with Japan. Often described as a tragicomedy, the novel has dramatic, melodramatic, and farcical aspects. The climactic episode relates to the heroic protagonist, First Lieutenant Douglas Roberts, or Mister

Roberts, who loses his typical patience and instead directly contests and outwits the despised, incompetent Captain Morton’s abusive authority and petty tyranny. Roberts, a twenty-six-year-old from Chicago, who dropped out of medical school to join the wartime Navy, has been the cargo and ship maintenance officer for two and a half years. 88

As the only officer or person aboard who can get the crew to work, the men worship

Roberts for his competence, natural leadership, respect, confidence, intelligence, and humor. The other officers are apathetic, and everyone detests Captain Morton, a middle- aged Merchant Marine, whom they refer to as “The Old Man” as well as “stupid bastard”

(Heggen 3, 9).

The novel opens in satiric fashion with the description of the ship as “this Man o’

War” as it stagnates in a typically dreary Pacific backwater bay. The crew and officers aboard sleep as much as possible, play cards and dominoes, read magazines and make and drink jungle juice, their homemade alcoholic brew. This is briefly juxtaposed to the war and battles raging in Europe and Okinawa, along with the fact that the men occasionally load cargo and do ship maintenance. Roberts copes by “working until sleep

[is] unavoidable,” and by “prowling the ship during sleepless nights and reading philosophy and literature” (Heggen 6, 70). He also joins the nightly gathering of his friends including his intellectual friend, Doc, and Ensign Pulver, Roberts’s adoring disciple, who amuses them with sex stories while good-naturedly enduring jokes about his dog-eared book of pornography.

High jinks supply the fraternity essential to offset the boredom, loneliness, the lack of women, and difficult conditions. They also provide retributive sport in protest of the Captain’s bullying mean-spiritedness. In the first of these stories, Pulver misses the bulls-eye, but Roberts succeeds, hitting “the Old Man’s” substantial buttocks during the nightly movie to the glee of crew, using a slingshot and rolled-up tinfoil balls (Heggen 89

11). This prompts the Captain’s rage over the loud speaker, which is satirically described in military language: "the snipers chose their place of concealment.. . . Roberts figured his ballistics correctly... the crew got to battle stations,” and the perpetrators are not discovered (14). In another such farcical story, the men discover they can observe nurses showering by pointing their binoculars and the more powerful rangefinder lens at an un­ curtained window in a building on the island’s shore. But when Pulver and Langston show Miss Girard, one of the nurses, around the ship, she overhears the men arguing and betting which one "is the one with the birth mark on her ass," foiling Pulver’s plans to seduce her (109). In yet another comic caper, Pulver bumbles a plan meant to make a huge noise to disturb the Captain’s precious sleep.

The crew is overjoyed when they hear they’ll be anchoring at “Elysium” in the

“Limbo” islands, instead of at “Apathy,” “Tedium,” or “Ennui” islands, in another farcical episode after the ship has been out of the States for three years with only three desultory afternoons of liberty leave (Heggen 132-133). As they eagerly prepare for a few days of sex, liquor, and the need to “raise hell together,” the Captain initially denies the liberty when they reach Elysium saying, "[t]hey screw me, now I’ll screw them!”

(133, 137). Before the crew has time to react, the Captain changes his mind for no apparent reason and permits a section of the crew to take the liberty on “Elysium.” They end up wrecking total havoc in town. Island patrols haul back to the ship completely passed out, drunken crewmen. Most are bloody from fights. Others sneak one native girl aboard for a few days and another tries to bring aboard a stolen goat. The liberty leave 90

ends with a story about David Bookser, the youngest and presumably only virginal crewman, who is teased as well as protected by the men. Bookser ends up spending the three days and nights of the liberty with the island beauty, the daughter of a wealthy islander, with whom he has fallen in love. As the only man to have had a truly romantic experience during the liberty, Bookser’s status is comically raised among the awed crew.

In the climactic dramatic story, the Captain turns down Roberts’s requests for transfer since he never recommends such requests from officers out of "pure spite," as the narrator describes it (Heggen 112). The Captain sits all day in his cabin scanning the foredeck through his portholes for minor infractions he’ll easily find. In shrill profane monologues, the Captain threatens the officer-of-the-deck that he’ll issue a punishment of ten days confined to quarters for anyone who disobeys his rules. So far, the Captain has only carried out this threat with Lieut. Carney, who thoroughly enjoyed the ten days spent in his room. On this day, however, the Captain aims his wrath at Roberts, who is directing a complicated cargo operation. Roberts loses his typical cool and instead tells the Captain he's busy. Enraged, the Captain issues the ten-day punishment. Calling the

Captain’s bluff, Roberts goads him to immediately enforce the ten days, knowing the

Captain needs Roberts’s leadership to manage cargo. The Captain doesn’t enforce the punishment and instead retreats to his cabin.

In another serious story, Big Gerhart, utterly miserable in the heat, says, “ ‘[t]o hell with it... I’ll be god-damned if I’m going to keep a shirt on today!’ ” (Heggen 122).

He starts to abuse the weary little dog, Lady, who lives aboard and is also limp in the 91

heat, prodding and slapping her sharply before he pulls her to her feet and waltzes her about by her front paws. Wiley tells him to leave her alone, but Gerhart doesn’t stop until Lady whines in pain. The Captain calls to inform Gerhart that he’s on report for being shirtless, and orders him to wear his shirt. Infuriated, the pacing Gerhart turns on

Red Stevens, a very shy but well-liked boy, taunting him about his sexual relationship with his pretty new wife. Blushing, Stevens answers his questions for a while until he snaps, smashing Gerhart on the side of the head with a spanner wrench as hard as he can.

Wiley manages to grab his arm before Stevens strikes another blow. Gerhart gets thirteen stitches and a week in sickbay. Stevens gets a summary court-martial, but the sympathetic officers only fine him twenty-five dollars.

In other dramatic stories, the Captain denies Thompson leave to support his wife at the funeral of his eighteen-month old daughter who he’s never seen. Thompson’s buddies worry about him when he pounds the wall, doesn’t sleep, and laughs so hard he cries, but then suddenly acts as if absolutely nothing is wrong. Another story tragicomically references Biddle, the butcher, getting sent to a psychiatric hospital after charging the Italians twice with a butcher knife. In another serious story about Roberts and Dolan on night shift, Roberts starts inadvertently saying out loud his romantic but sanitized daydream about a lovely young couple’s evening out in San Francisco. During

Robert’s spoken reverie, Dolan angrily thinks to himself that Roberts is way off base since men on leave “just want to get laid,” regardless of the level of appeal of the “girls”

(Heggen 61). 92

Although the central episodes about the conflict between Roberts and the Captain also have some comic relief, they are essentially dramatic. Roberts wants to be transferred to a combat billet from the outset, but the Captain refuses to approve his requests. Intensified by another run-in with the Captain, Roberts impulsively throws the

Captain's beloved palm tree overboard and swings a stanchion against the Captain's bulkhead to wake him up, thinking no one sees him. The Captain threatens general court- martial and no liberty leave until the perpetrator comes forward. He replaces the missing trees with two more as the crew rejoices over the incident. Dolan, who has seen Roberts throw the tree overboard, tells three others and they make Roberts a medal in the shape of a palm tree inscribed as follows: "ORDER OF THE PALM. TO LIEUT. D.A.

ROBERTS, FOR ACTION AGAINST THE ENEMY, ABOVE AND BEYOND THE

CALL OF DUTY ON THE NIGHT OF 8 MAY 1945" (Heggen 180). When Roberts tells them they’ve got the wrong man, they still give it to him. He quietly and sadly accepts the medal, although it mocks his dream of combat heroism.

Roberts is soon thrilled when he gets orders for reassignment to combat duty on a destroyer. The crew’s all-night drunken antic-laden farewell party for Roberts gets underway, including an honorary toss overboard of the two new palm trees. Everything goes wrong on the ship after Roberts departs, with men fighting daily and Pulver seeming lost. The Captain blames Roberts for the missing two trees, replacing them with four.

With a second letter from Roberts, Pulver also gets news of Roberts’s death by a

Kamikaze hit. It happened while Roberts and another officer were drinking coffee a few 93

days before the first atomic bomb is dropped. Doc tells the anguished, shocked Pulver that he thinks this is what Roberts wanted.

Pulver decides it is impossible to inform the other officers about Roberts’s death, thinking they’d use it as a mere diversion. He realizes they have totally surrendered to apathy, although “not as a state of negation, but a faith of positiveness” (Heggen 219).

With horror, Pulver realizes that he, too, has surrendered to apathy and even enjoyed living for over a year on the ship in a state of “insatiable hunger for triviality” (219).

Alone, he starts to whimper, but “[cjrying wouldn’t help. Nothing would help, but suddenly, there was something to do,” and Pulver throws the Captain’s replacement trees overboard (220). Next, Pulver immediately goes to the Captain, perceiving him through the window before he enters, “sitting, reading, in the large chair of his cabin. In the harsh cone of light from the floor lamp he looked old, and not evil, but merely foolish” (220).

In the last sentence in the novel, Pulver tells the Captain, “I just threw your damn palm trees overboard” (221).

The play generally retains fidelity to the novel’s overall plot and characters. It uses the following farcical episodes from the novel: the nurse’s story; the wild liberty on

Elysium; as well as versions of the firecracker incident linked to Pulver’s name; and a prank involving hiding noisy marbles in the Captain’s quarters to annoy him while the boat moves at night. But the play omits the serious episodes about Big Gerhart and

Thompson, only retaining dramatic episodes related to the feud between Roberts and the

Captain. However, the play changes the plot structure of how their conflict is resolved. 94

In the play, the Captain punishes Roberts for humiliating him in the cargo scene by blackmailing Roberts into giving up his right to request a transfer in exchange for the

Captain’s agreement to give the crew shore leave. The play’s Captain does not transfer

Roberts to combat duty, and he is not described as looking like a sad fool in the last scene as in the novel.

The following actions occur in the play, which are mostly not in the novel. In response to Dowdy’s pleas for a liberty for the men, Roberts supplies the boozy Port

Director with a quart of Scotch, compliments of the Captain. Roberts has been saving it for his “Resurrection Day,” or the day he finally gets to leave the ship (Heggen and

Logan 17). But the missing Johnny Walker upsets Pulver, who has designs on the bottle as bait to supposedly seduce women. However, Pulver is pleased when Doc and Roberts concoct Pulver a fake replacement made out of medical alcohol, iodine, Coca-Cola, and hair tonic. In the cargo scene, Roberts further fuels the Captain’s rage by giving away a couple of crates of oranges to another ship that hasn’t had fruit in two months. Although the Reluctant has plenty, the Captain wants the oranges for his own mess. Additionally,

Roberts lets the men go shirtless in the blazing heat to the outrage of the Captain.

Roberts’s scheme with the Port Director to get the men a liberty works out, and the ship is sent to Elysium Island. But after much preparation and excitement and upon arrival, the Captain announces liberty is just a rumor.

The play’s blackmail scene unfolds as Roberts goes to the Captain to demand the men’s liberty leave. Prepared by a thank-you note from the Port Director about the 95

booze, the expectant Captain wrests a quid pro quo from Roberts of no transfer in exchange for the men’s liberty. Roberts’s anger bursts out as he rhetorically asks how an

“ignorant, arrogant, ambitious . . . jackass“ like the Captain could ever get into the Navy

(Heggen and Logan 40). In response, the Captain shouts that he’ll court-martial Roberts.

Although Roberts briefly outwits him by agreeing and telling him to call in witnesses, the

Captain backs down, and instead tells Roberts the worst thing he can do to him is to keep him on the ship. Roberts not only agrees to no more transfer requests in exchange for the crew’s liberty, he also agrees to secrecy about it and to cease making any trouble for the

Captain. The men turn against Roberts thinking he is bucking for another stripe when

Roberts stops standing up to the Captain.

In further developments of the play’s blackmail plot, Doc figures out what the

Captain has on Roberts, although Roberts denies it, while the men continue to freeze

Roberts out. The combination of the crew’s coolness and the radio news of the European victory prompt Roberts into action. Upon hearing the radio announcer also talk about how it is up to the remaining soldiers to destroy the “forces of ambition, cruelty, arrogance and stupidity . . . [and the] malignant growth,” Roberts throws the Captain’s palm tree overboard (Heggen and Logan 61). He marches to the radio band’s playing

“The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and salutes the tree before heaving it (60). The hysterical Captain calls Roberts in to confront him about his missing tree. Pretending not to know that the Captain is talking about the tree, Roberts assures him he has not sent in any more transfer request letters. In a rage, the Captain gasps, falls over and tells Roberts 96

he has stabbed the Captain in the back. After Doc stabilizes the Captain, the men greet

Roberts warmly now that they understand why he seemed to forsake them. Lindstrom,

Dolan, and Insigna have been listening to this exchange without being seen.

Roberts gets a transfer to combat duty, believing Dolan’s lie that he got the transfer because the Navy Bureau found his old request and they needed officers. But

Doc reveals that he and the entire crew had a contest to see who could best forge the

Captain’s signature for a transfer letter. Feeling terrible, Roberts wonders if he should be leaving the ship. The morning of the transfer, three crewmen bring Roberts the same medal that is described in the novel. In the letter Pulver gets from Roberts describing

Roberts’s happiness being at war at last, Roberts says he’s discovered that noncombatants are brave and heroic for enduring endless tedium. Pulver opens a second letter with news of Roberts’s death, which he shares with Doc and Dowdy. Doc tells Pulver to give the crew the first letter about their heroism, saying it belongs to them. While Doc looks straight ahead, stricken as he contemplates Roberts’s death, Pulver “gets up restlessly . .. straightens . . . [and] seems to grow” (Heggen and Logan 73). He heaves the Captain’s replacement trees overboard. In the last lines of the play, Pulver steps into Roberts’s shoes as the natural leader of the crew, telling the Captain, “I just threw your palm trees over-board. Now what’s all this crap about no movie tonight?” (73).

Brooks Atkinson described Henry Fonda’s acting in the role of Roberts as a perfectly “simple and genuine” romantic hero without exhibitionism and heroics ( ).

He also described William Harrigan’s Captain as “a bitter and callous” ship’s captain, 97

Robert Keith’s Doc as “a quizzically knowing ship’s doctor,” and David Wayne’s Pulver as “a dazed but well-meaning ensign” (Ibid.). Jo Mielziner’s scenery was described as a

“gaunt and harsh piece of sea-going machinery” (Ibid.). Logan’s determination to mine the script for farce was evident in the fact that he told Mielziner to lower a half-ton of eight passed-out sailors onto center stage by cargo net. Mielziner agreed when Logan told Hayward it would bring in two thousand dollars worth of laughs.

The 1955 Hollywood movie’s plot is similar to the stage script. The dialogue is similar in the movie and the play, although more compressed in the movie. But profanity, bodily parts, and several sexual references are the most sanitized in the movie in comparison to the play, which is more sanitized than the novel. Roberts and Doc both look fifteen years older in the movie, whereas Roberts is describes as twenty-six in the novel, and Doc, about midthirties in the novel and play. Powell as Doc in the movie also seems more of a world-weary character compared to Atkinson’s description of Keith’s quizzical Doc on the stage. James Cagney’s Captain in the movie sounds similar in descriptions to the play’s bitter and crude William Harrigan.

Small changes germane to this analysis that occur in the movie include the use of six pretty young women nurses instead of the play’s one Miss Girard. The men, seen diving off the ship after being granted a ten-minute swim, splash quickly back as soon as they see the nurses aboard in the movie. Girard doesn’t flirt with Roberts in the movie, although he confidently beams a big smile at all the nurses upon introduction.

Additionally, the novel’s David Bookser scene is adapted for the movie, although it is 98

omitted in the play.

III. Analysis of Gender

Mister Roberts is set in the largely all-male military world of the World War II warship. As a result of a large group of men together on a military ship that is typically isolated from women, male gender coding provides a lens through which to view postwar cultural shifts reflected in its adaptation process. Contrary to popular opinion that the fifties were a stable decade when the nation was reaping the postwar economic and social rewards of victory, the fifties reflect the paradox of simultaneous simmering conflict related to the contradictions of social conformity and the drive for individuality. This chapter’s contention is that the play, Mister Roberts, amplifies the novel’s 1950s paradox through complex gender coding contained in the valorization of patriotic, heroic masculinity, while also revealing conservative forces. However, although cultural complexity is present, Mister Roberts and its adaptations are ultimately conservative in their endorsement of conformity in the name of patriotism and democracy.

In addition to male gender issues and in particular, hyper-masculinity, the military figures prominently in the adaptation process of Mister Roberts. Theater scholar Gerald

Berkowitz calls Mister Roberts “strong satire” that “dare[s] to suggest the American military was not a thoroughly efficient and legally run operation,” and one of the few postwar Broadway plays between 1945 and 1960 that risks such satire despite its sentimentality (118). However, the satiric aspect of Mister Roberts needs to be 99

contextualized by the culture of the Cold War as well as by the outcome of the adaptation process.

Hyper-masculinity has complex gender coding in the play and other forms of the story in relation to the “hot” war and Cold War. Hyper-masculinity is coded as masculine in individual military heroism on behalf of freedom and democracy through the defeat of Japanese totalitarian aggression — and, since it was one world war, in context of the European war’s defeat of fascism. Yet the military ironically required conformity as a necessity of victory, which is traditionally coded as feminine. In this sense, hyper-masculinity is a contradiction because it was affirmed through individual bravery in battle, as well as through conformity in the military. In addition to military conformity, there were conformist pressures during the McCarthy era and the burgeoning

American corporate culture, which also required increasing conformity. In this sense, the versions of Mister Roberts reflect hyper-masculine or troubled men who represent anxieties related to how tensions between conformity and individuality disrupt the traditional gender alignment or axis of masculinity/femininity.

Another important theme related to the military in this analysis includes the idealized “Ordinary Man-as- hero” as amplification of patriotism, and in particular related to noncombatants. Noncombatant guilt is significant in relation to masculinity, heroism, and patriotism. The large majority of men in uniform during the war were noncombatants or support personnel for combatants. Scholars of postwar drama point out that the frequent airbrushing away of horrific battlefield carnage and the domestication of war 100

through indirect settings like Mister Roberts provide the distance postwar spectators needed to come to terms with the violence and losses of the war. This chapter contends that the backwater and domesticated ship setting also heightens the ramped-up masculinity despite the lack of battlefield heroics. The irony of the intensified representation of masculinity as hyper-masculinity lies in the fact that the enemy is the ship’s commander, not the Japanese or Germans. The nonbattle setting is therefore also ripe for representations of hyper-masculinity as compensation for noncombatant guilt.

This discussion first traces the construction of masculinity in the adaptation process of the novel, Mister Roberts, and how the play’s script changes the action of the novel. This will be followed by how the original movie is also affected by changes to the play, as well as by Hollywood and the Navy. The changes examined are as follows: how

Roberts gets into combat, the crew’s amplified fraternity, Roberts’s degree of self- sacrifice and his sentimental letter to the crew, Doc’s and Pulver’s character shifts, the omission of intellectually and politically progressive references, as well as conflict and violence among the crew, and changes in the representations of sexuality.

The distinction between the novel and the play that launches other changes is about who gets Roberts into combat. Although in the end, it is the Japanese who kill Roberts, in the novel, it is the Captain who transfers Roberts to combat. In the play, it is the crew.

The cargo scene reflects changes in the battle for domination between Roberts and the

Captain. While human beings routinely struggle for power, it is the specific shifts from 101

page to stage that illuminate the contradictions of the fifties through higher stakes and a more polarized but complex representation of gender.

Here is the some of novel’s text and a description of the episode: “[Njormally the

Captain had just enough sense to leave Roberts alone — except for a little nagging in a routine way to keep up appearances — but today, he clearly forgot himself," and he constantly calls Roberts about crew members without caps and cigarette butts on deck, while Roberts is directing the complicated cargo operation (Heggen 115). Roberts, who is usually patient through such episodes, instead tells the Captain he's busy during a cargo operation and that he and the crew just need to be left alone to get the work done: “ . . . in extreme anger, his (the Captain’s) face was beet red. He shouted at Roberts, ‘What the hell do you mean, telling me you’re busy? By God, I’m running this here ship and when I tell you I want to talk to you, by God, you get on that phone in a goddam quick hurry! Do you understand?’ ” “ ‘Captain,’ (Roberts) said easily, ‘there’s no use your coming up here and getting all excited. We’re doing this job as well as we can, and if you just leave us alone and quit bothering us, we’ll get along all right.’ ” Enraged, the Captain says "‘ . .. no smart son-of-a-bitching college officer is going to talk like that! I don’t have to put up with crap like that and I don’t intend to! You can go in your room for ten days and see how you like that!’ " Roberts says “ ‘Can I go down in my room now?’ ” to which the

Captain replies, “ ‘Yeah, I know you would! You think you’re pretty goddamn smart, don’t you?’ ” Roberts again goads him to be immediately sent to his room. The Captain, now visibly deflated says, “ ‘By God,. . . I don’t ask a lot from you officers, but when I 102

want a thing done I want it done! . . . just do your job and don’t go trying to tell me how to run this here ship and we’ll get along all right.’ ” Roberts goads him another time about going to his room, but the Captain mutters fiercely as he walks away from Roberts saying,

“ ‘By God . . . I’ll let you know when I give you ten days and by God, you’ll know it!

Now you just get to work . . ” At his heels, Robert says, “ ‘Captain, if you don’t like the way I’m handling my job, why don’t you get me transferred?’ ” Again, the Captain tells him to just take care of his job and not to try to run the ship. But Roberts gets the last word as the Captain ducks quickly through the door, saying " ‘[a] 11 you have to do is write a letter and say you want to get rid of me.’ ” (Heggen 116-118).

Roberts exhibits a kind of rugged individual and brave masculinity when he takes on the Captain’s wrath in front of the crew. His pursuit of a combat transfer reflects individualism as a deviation from the unquestioned, hypocritical conformity to authority required by the Captain. In contrast, the Captain exhibits effeminacy or traditionally codified feminine qualities underneath his rage, compensating for his buried sense of shame as he tries to redeem his masculinity now at stake in relation to Roberts’s. These traditionally coded feminine qualities include the Captain’s dependence on Roberts to get the job done, as well as fear and incompetency in relation to this traditionally masculine cargo work. Although the association of masculine qualities with Roberts and feminine qualities with the Captain help reinforce some of the gender distinctions, these distinctions will be shown as not fitting neatly into the traditional gender axis. 103

Part of the complexity of gender distinctions is associated with the intermingled representation of class. The Captain’s exhibition of traditional aggressive masculinity is related to his assertion that his leadership is a result of his own working-class fortitude since he worked his way up in the merchant service. But this aspect of the Captain’s masculinity does not compensate for his effeminate fear and shame about his incompetence. Similarly, although Roberts’s masculinity is reflected in his rugged individualism as he alone battles the false authority of the Captain, beneath Roberts’s strength is vulnerability. Roberts’s need to prove his masculinity suggests growing up

“softened” or feminized by unearned privileges associated with the false authority of inherited wealth and class. His medical school education suggests that he is at least middle-class. We learn of Roberts’s college education through the Captain’s wrath about it. The conflict between the two men is evident in the play’s cargo scene as follows:

CAPTAIN. You’re damn right I want you to leave the deck. When I tell

you I want to see you, I mean now, Mister! I mean jump! Do you

understand? (Stage directions indicate crewmen are listening.)

ROBERTS. Yes, Captain. I’ll remember that next time.

CAPTAIN. You’re damn right you’ll remember it! Don’t ever tell me

you’re too busy to see me! Ever! (ROBERTS doesn V answer. The CAPTAIN

points to a letter he is carrying.) You think you’re pretty cute with

this letter, don’t you? You’re trying to get me in bad with the Admiral,

ain’t you? Ain’t you? 104

ROBERTS. No, I’m not, Captain.

CAPTAIN. Then what do you mean by writing “disharmony aboard this

ship”?

ROBERTS. Because it’s true, Captain. ( T grin at each other.)

CAPTAIN. Any disharmony on this ship is my own doing!

ROBERTS. That’s true, too, Captain.

CAPTAIN. Damn right it’s true. And it ain’t gonna be in any letter that

leaves this ship.. . . I got a reputation with the Admiral and I ain’t gonna lose it

on account of a letter written by some smart-alec college officer. Now you

retype that letter . . . But this is the last one, understand?

ROBERTS. Captain, every man in the Navy has the right to send in a

request for transfer . . . and no one can change the wording. That’s Navy

regs.

CAPTAIN. (After a pause.) How about that, Dolan?

DOLAN. That’s what it says, sir.

CAPTAIN. This sons-a-bitchin’ Navy! I never put up with crap like that

in the merchant service. All right, I’ll send this one in as is —

disapproved.. . . you ain’t gonna write any more. You bring one next

week and you’ll regret it the rest of your life.. . . Now get on

with your work. (Heggen and Logan 27-29) 105

Additionally evident here in the Captain’s working-class masculinity is his anti-“egghead” claim that he is more masculine than Roberts because of Roberts’s effeminate education.

The “egghead” idea refers to its use by the popular war hero, General Dwight D.

Eisenhower, who put Adlai Stevenson into such a position of helplessness with the purported epithet in the 1952 and 1956 presidential bids, despite Stevenson’s taking on the term with pride. The harm to Stevenson represents the power of the traditional binary of masculinity as brawn instead of brains in the fifties.

Next, in the play, the Captain twice tells Roberts to “shut up!” after hearing that he allowed the men to take their shirts off. He orders Roberts to put the men on report saying he doesn’t “ ‘give a damn if fifty men passed out’ ” (Heggen and Logan 29). He issues the ten-day punishment when he hears that Roberts gave away oranges to a needy ship.

Again, as in the novel, Roberts calls the Captain’s bluff, but with the more dramatic stage action of handing the Captain the megaphone. The enraged Captain tells him he’ll let

Roberts know when he’s ready to order the ten days in his room, slamming the megaphone back into Roberts’s stomach and ordering him back to work.

The dramatic stakes of the fight for male dominion are increased in the play in comparison to the novel in this scene by the addition of more elements Roberts knows will infuriate the Captain. This includes Roberts’s exposure of the Captain’s ignorance of these regulations, his greed over the oranges, and his senseless bullying of the shiftless men in the miserable heat. The increased stakes also include Roberts’s belittling and ironic comic critique of the Captain’s witlessness about the “ ‘disharmony aboard this ship,’ ” much to 106

the delight of the crew (Heggen and Logan 28). Although Roberts’s letter attributes the

“disharmony” to himself so he can get a transfer, the crew snickers when they hear the

Captain boasting about his own credit for the “disharmony” because the Captain doesn’t see the irony in Roberts taking the credit for it, particularly given how much Roberts is beloved by the crew. At the end of the above quoted scene, the play also creates an additional high stakes action of Roberts handing the Captain the megaphone, physically daring him to manage the cargo. The Captain virtually punches Roberts in the stomach with the returned megaphone in his rage about the exposure of the fact that the Captain doesn’t know how to do the job.

In the novel, once Roberts has thrown the Captain’s tree overboard, the Captain finally fulfills Roberts’s request for transfer in utter frustration. Retaining Roberts onboard has become more frustrating and humiliating for the Captain compared to fulfilling his request, despite Roberts’s work competence. Roberts’s additional humiliation of the Captain in the play, however, which serves to further fan the flames of the Captain’s fear and rage, doesn’t result in a transfer. It elevates Roberts’s hyper­ masculine dominance, which the Captain will use against Roberts in the liberty quid pro quo instead of fulfilling Roberts’s transfer request:

ROBERTS. When are you going to let this crew go ashore?

CAPTAIN. I’m not. This wasn’t my idea — coming to a Liberty Port.

One of my officers arranged it with a certain Port Director—gave him a

bottle of Scotch whiskey—compliments of the Captain.. . . I was a little 107

pre-voked about not being consulted....

ROBERTS. Let’s quit wasting time. Don’t you hear that music? Don’t

you know it’s tearing those men apart?

CAPTAIN. . . . Now you listen to m e.. . . I’m gonna wear that [full

commander’s] cap some day and you’re going to help me. . . . you helped

me get that palm tree by working cargo.. . . There’s nothing gonna stand

between me and that hat — certainly not you. Now last week I told you

there wasn’t going to be any more letters. But what do I find on my

desk .. .”

ROBERTS. How are you going to stop it, Captain?

CAPTAIN. I ain’t, you are. Just how much do you want this crew to have

a liberty anyhow? . . . ( Leans forward.) Enough to stop writing letters

ever? Because that’s the only way this crew is gonna get ashore today -

- or any other day. {Leans back.) Well, we’ve had our little talk. What

do you say?

ROBERTS. {After a moment.) How did you get in the Navy? How did

you get on our side? You’re what I joined the fight against.

(Heggen and Logan 40).

The ramped up stakes of masculinity in the play compared to the novel amplify the gender representations and their underlying meaning. Technically, the play’s Captain wins the power battle with Roberts in the quid prod quo since the play’s Captain does not 108

fulfill Roberts’s transfer request. The Captain’s victory is heard in Roberts’s remark that the Captain represents tyranny, or what he joined the Navy to fight against, which tacitly acknowledges Roberts’s choice, along with his fury. The play seems to suggest a more cynical naval captain and a more liberal critique of military hyper-masculinity compared to the novel’s representation, where the Captain fulfills the transfer request, giving

Roberts what he wants. But the play’s more aggressive or hyper-masculine degree of

Roberts’s public confrontation with the Captain also more deeply emasculates the Captain, further driving his need to hide his shameful false authority by keeping Roberts onboard to work.

Roberts’s hyper-masculinity in the play is represented by his initiating a solo attack on the Captain in addition to Roberts’s ardent pursuit of what he initially considers heroism. However, Roberts’s gender coding is more complex because his battle with the

Captain is also related to Roberts’s support of the crew. Self-sacrifice is traditionally coded as feminine. In the novel, Roberts doesn’t sacrifice his personal urgent quest for heroism through a transfer for the men’s liberty leave as he does in the play.

The melodrama of male heroism is leveraged beyond Roberts to the entire crew in a significant change between the novel and the play in the context of this examination of masculinity. When the onus for Roberts’s transfer is shifted to the crew, masculine fraternity drives the denouement of Roberts’s epiphany and death in the play rather than the one-on-one or individualistic masculine power battle between the Captain and Roberts.

This happens in the script when the whole crew and Doc stage the contest to see who can 109

best forge the Captain’s signature in a letter requesting Roberts’s transfer. Roberts finds out about this when Doc approaches him to talk about his transfer:

DOC. You’re a happy guy, aren’t you?

ROBERTS. Yep. You’re happy about it too, aren’t you, Doc?

DOC. I think it’s the only thing for you. {Casually.) What do you think of

the crew now, Doug?

ROBERTS. We’re all right now. I think they’re nice guys — all of them.

DOC. Unh-hunh. And how do you think they feel about you?

ROBERTS. I think they like me all right. . . till the next guy comes along.

DOC. You don’t think you’re necessary to them?

ROBERTS. ( Sitting on a bunk.) Hell, no. No officer’s necessary to the

crew, Doc.

DOC. Are you going to leave this ship believing that?

ROBERTS. That’s nothing against them, Doc. They’re too busy looking

out for themselves, to care about anyone else.

DOC. Well, take a good, deep breath. (He drinks some alcohol.) What do

you think got you your orders? Prayer and fasting? Sending in enough

Wheatie box tops?

ROBERTS. My orders? Why, what Dolan said—one of my old letters

turned up.

DOC. Bat crap! This crew got you transferred. They were so busy looking 110

out for themselves that they took a chance of landing in prison for five

years—any one of them. Since you couldn’t send in a letter of transfer,

they sent one in for you. Since they knew the Captain wouldn’t sign it

approved, they didn’t bother him— they signed it for him .. . . they had a mass

meeting down in the compartment. . . every man in this crew—a hundred and

sixty-seven of them—signed the Captain’s name on a blank sheet of paper.. . .

the judges were drunk, but apparently, from the results, they chose well.. . . I

am the only officer aboard who does know.. . . It was quite something to see,

Doug. A hundred and sixty-seven guys with only one idea in their heads—to do

something for Mister Roberts. (Heggen and Logan 67-68).

Doc asserts here that service on the ship is as patriotic as combat. His description of the signing contest also signifies it as the epitome of fraternal bonding since the crew becomes the masculinized but liberal “Ordinary Man-as-hero” in the comic conceit of the signing contest. The crew’s forged transfer letter, however, which is absent in the novel, ends up transferring Roberts into harm’s way where he ironically dies while drinking coffee. The crew and Doc, despite his patriotic advocacy for heroic service aboard the ship, are both penalized for siding with masculine nonconformity against the Captain in their loss of

Roberts. Their failure to rescue or shore up the authority of the Captain as the incompetent patriarch implies liberal forces. However, Roberts simultaneously valorizes the crew in his epiphanal letter revealing his misjudgment about leaving them: Ill

the most terrible enemy of this war is the boredom that eventually becomes

a faith and, therefore, a sort of suicide — and I know now that the ones

who refuse to surrender to it must be very strong. . . . Right now, I’m

looking at something that’s hanging over my desk: a preposterous hunk of

brass . . . I’d rather have it than the Congressional Medal of Honor. It tells

me what I’ll always be proudest of — that at a time in the world when

courage counted most, I lived among a hundred and sixty-seven brave men.

(Heggen and Logan 72).

Gender and its related cultural and political coding become more complex with this denouement. The play’s sentimental letter represents Roberts’s realization of his misguided pursuit of individual heroism, which, although masculine, is now seen as heroism of the “One” or an elite pursuit. Since Roberts’s epiphany reveals it as elite in contrast to the heroism of the crew, heroism of the “One” can be coded as conservative. If logically extended to the context of the war, the elitist heroism of the “One” might represent fascism. But Roberts’s choice to pursue combat alone is not representative of fascist elitism, but rather of heroic elitism in the sense of his blindness to the value of noncombatant service. His epiphany in his letter reveals his insight into the heroism of the fraternal as democratically valorous in the image of the noncombatant crew as the

“Ordinary Man-as-hero.” However, fraternity or conformity is also typically coded as feminine, which is typically paired with liberal forces. Yet here, fraternity is conservatively upheld in its opposition to what is typically coded as liberal masculinized 112

competition and individuality. The traditional gender axis and binaries are disrupted, suggesting the paradox of the fifties, in which conformity and individuality collide as conflict fermenting beneath seeming economic and social postwar stability.

Although accidental, Roberts’s death symbolizes severe punishment for not remaining fraternal as the natural leader of the crew. He is punished for not being subordinate to the powerful military bureaucracy in order to support the fraternity of the democratized “Ordinary Man-as-hero.” In this way, the play ultimately endorses conservativism while also revealing liberal drives that are concomitant within a democracy. In this way, Mister Roberts also illuminates the fifties’ paradox of contradictory liberal and conservative forces related to the Cold War and the postwar culture of triumph. Roberts’s individual struggle to appear heroic and masculine seems intractable in the individual competition with Captain Morton, who is a satiric symbol of authoritarian and fascist tyranny, as well as of the complicated realities of a military in a democracy. Roberts’s struggle in relation to Captain Morton can be seen as a reflection of America’s national struggle to appear heroic and masculine in the seemingly intractable individual competition that suggests national competitiveness with the Soviet

Union. The Captain’s drive to force Roberts to submit and conform to his petty tyranny is also parallel to the force of the fear mongering and conformity demanded by the proofs of anti-communist patriotism generated by HU AC.

The satiric representation of the Captain is amplified in the play by his being more of a bully than a sad fool as portrayed in the end of the novel, and through Roberts’s 113

hyper-masculine bravery in taking on his more powerful bullying. This serves to increase the stakes in the final denouement when Roberts realizes his mistake in not supporting the crew and, ultimately, the Captain. While the increased stakes heighten the final conservative outcome of the play, the satire also provides a liberal critique of the military’s retention of such leadership, in what could be read as an uncovering of wartime realities. By World War II, there were huge developments in mass production and propaganda carried out by the new instruments of communication developed between the wars. The public did not know about such internal problems with certain commanders because the media and press kept quiet about it during the war. Additionally, the

Captain’s masculine individual pride blinds the Captain to the real needs of those he would have femininely conform to win the war. In this sense, the Captain signifies the contradictions between masculine liberal individuality and conservative feminine conformity. The result is also that he is unable to remove himself as a burned-out leader.

The play represents the vulnerable feminine side of Roberts’s hyper-masculinity like it does the Captain’s. The play retains the novel’s depiction of Roberts as a man beset by his own lack of self-knowledge. In the first few minutes of the play, Roberts is described as “preoccupied” in the stage directions. When Doc asks him what’s troubling him, he says he’s been up all night (Heggen and Logan 7). In a patriotically romantic tone, Roberts tells Doc about the sight of the massive U.S. convoy as follows:

ROBERTS. (With emotion.) I was up on the bridge. I was just standing

there looking out to sea. I couldn’t bear to look at that island any more. 114

All of a sudden I noticed something. Little black specks crawling over the

horizon. I looked through the glasses and it was a formation of our ships

that stretched for miles! Carriers and battleships and cans—a whole task

force, Doc!

DOC. Why didn’t you break me out? I’ve never seen a battleship!

ROBERTS. They came on and they passed within half a mile of the reef!

Carriers so big they blacked out half the sky! And battle-wagons sliding

along—dead quiet! I could see the men on the bridges. And this is what

knocked me out, Doc. Somehow—I thought I was on those bridges—I

thought I was riding west across the Pacific. I watched them until they

were out of sight, Doc— and I was right there on those bridges all the

time.

DOC. I know how that must have hurt, Doug.

ROBERTS. And then I looked down from our bridge and saw our

Captain’s palm tree! {Points at the palm tree bitterly.) Our trophy for

superior achievement! (Heggen and Logan 7-8)

In the novel, Roberts says he has a “compulsion” for transfer to combat duty, a term signifying Freud’s influence on the midcentury (Heggen, 161). Although the play doesn’t employ the term “compulsion,” Roberts is similarly troubled and doomed by his limited self-understanding regarding the function and consequences of his masculine guilt about 115

not participating in battle. Robert’s guilt is evident in the play’s scene between Doc and

Roberts when Doc tries to talk Roberts out of pursuing a combat transfer:

ROBERTS. We’ve got nothing to do with this war. Maybe that’s

why we’re on this ship — because we’re not good enough to

fight. (Then quietly with .) emot Maybe there’s some

omniscient son-of-a-bitch who goes down the line of all the

servicemen and picks out the ones to send into combat, the ones

whose glands secrete enough adrenaline, or whose great-great-

grandfathers weren’t afraid of the dark or something. The rest of

us are shoved off to ships like this where we can’t do any harm.

(Heggen and Logan 24)

These lines also illuminate Roberts’s fear of being insufficiently manly. Although the novel has more images of his insomnia, describing how he prowls the decks at night, as well as references to his workaholism, the play captures Roberts’s conflict. It conveys

Roberts’s sense of his own masculinity as not unproblematic, easy or literally straightforward like the masculinity of the midcentury male icon, John Wayne. In the conventional gender binary, Roberts’s preoccupying vulnerability is effeminately coded since it lacks masculine emotional control, stoicism, and practical activity or the picture of traditional autonomous masculine individuality.

Critics of conformity in postwar American society were concerned by the cult of consensus that seemed to prevail and its emblematic men in gray flannel suits heading 116

daily to corporate offices from American “Levittowns,” the new homogenized suburbs.

The subject of the classic texts of the period, such as William H. Whyte’s The

Organization Man (1956) and David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), document

America’s midcentury growth of homogenized corporate and suburban cultures. Both books warned postwar Americans of the dangers of the loss of individualism in exchange for passive ambition under the corporate and bureaucratic control of others and the sacrifice of integrity for security.

Whyte and similar social critics further suggested that the dangers of conformity also reflected the nation’s new affluence. Increased wealth coincided with a growing economic gap between the rich and the poor between 1949 and 1956. As Halberstam wrote later, the paradox of the fifties consensus was that it obscured mounting conflict and controversy about this and other problems that set the stage for the 1960s era of protest.

Cold War scholar Bruce McConachie puts Mister Roberts in with a group of 1950s plays representing what he calls “Empty Boys” because they prefer to remain in an “aimless limbo” of internal conflict since “the adult world ahead of them seemed to promise less freedom and more compulsion” (65-66). McConachie’s assertion about “Empty Boys,” while perhaps overstated, helps amplify one component of the fifties’ paradox, which is dramatized in the play. In the end, the letter with Roberts’s epiphany and the one about his death reveal that Roberts is ultimately freed forever from “Empty Boy” limbo, but in the context of the play’s ultimate endorsement of conformity in the name of patriotism within the broader context of its representation of the paradox of the fifties. 117

The war exposed millions of American noncombatants as well as combatants steeped in the values of democracy and individualism to the ironic problems of autocracy and subordination fundamental to the military (Fussell 70). Such problems are ironic because American servicemen are acculturated in the broader democracy; yet the

American military that supposedly protects national democracy also seems to antithetically require an internal autocratic structure. Such ironies in the military realistically erupt in masculine aggression. However, the play omits the novel’s dramatic scenes of aggression; for example, it leaves out the stories of Big Gerhart or even the tragicomic reference to Biddle the Butcher. But the tragicomic stage continues to amplify the hyper-masculine stakes of aggression between Roberts and the Captain. The shift away from aggression among the crew in the play contributes to the valorization of the noncombatants. It lays the path for their heroic position as the democratized “Ordinary

Man-as-hero,” precipitating Roberts’s tragic downfall in not choosing to support them.

This is an example of how the exigencies of form, in this instance, that of the stage, require choices that change the emphasis of meanings represented in another form, in this case, the novel.

Masculine changes in relation to Doc and Pulver happen in adaptation that also have implications for increased conservativism. Although the novel’s Doc is social and will talk to anyone, he is also a more emotionally independent and complex character who enjoys advanced calculus problems and reads Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The novel’s

Roberts is also referenced as reading literature and philosophy, such as Jean Christophe, 118

The Magic Mountain, George Santayana, and English philosophers. When Roberts comes to talk to Doc in the novel about feeling “depressed as hell” about not being in combat and his “compulsion” to fight the war, Doc offers psychological and intellectual insights using

Freudian vocabulary from the period about “transference” in war (Heggen 161). Doc also offers his intellectual ideology about the war, saying he sees it as “a war of unrelieved necessity — nothing more. Any ideology attacking is only incidental. Not to say accidental,” among other similar remarks (162). But Doc also tells Roberts that he could

“kick his ass for leaving med school,” reminding him there’s still a war on he might see plenty of, and that “it’s through no fault of (Roberts’s) that (he’s) on this bucket instead of in a grave in Germany” (163).

In contrast, the more equal and intellectual tenor of Robert and Doc’s friendship is not apparent in the play, since there is not much left in the play at the level of shared literary or philosophical ideas. Doc’s ideas above about the war in the novel signal a more liberal treatment that would have seemed unpatriotic for the Cold War Broadway stage.

Likewise, Roberts’s telling Doc that he had wanted to serve in the Abraham Lincoln

Brigade would have been too politically “liberal.” There is also another political reference in the novel to the character Billings that is also omitted in the play. Billings’s “hobby [is] socialism” since he reads Upton Sinclair, Norman Thomas and Bertrand Russell (Heggen

81).

The play suggests a more emotionally engaged, avuncular character in Doc compared to the Doc of the novel, where he is described as “contradictory and 119

unpredictable,” “simultaneously cruel and compassionate,” as well as a depressive who drinks a lot and stays in his room (Heggen 36, 37). Although the novel’s Doc will talk to whoever comes by, he doesn’t seek socialization except with Roberts and the men who follow Roberts, Pulver, and one other minor character. By leaving out Doc’s more complex characteristics as quoted above in his political ideas about the war and in the description of him in the novel, the play instead emphasizes Doc’s sentimentality through his comments related to Roberts’s welfare. The following scene in the play shows Doc’s emotional engagement with Roberts, as well as more of his patriotism in regard to the importance of noncombatants, in addition to showing more of Roberts’s guilt:

DOC. Whether you like it or not, this sorry old bucket does a necessary

job.

ROBERTS. This sorry old bucket does a necessary job.

DOC. And you’re the guy who keeps her lumbering along. You keep this

crew working cargo . . . you keep them alive. .. on this bucket, you’re

deeper and more truly in this war than you ever would be anywhere else.

ROBERTS. Oh, geez, Doc. In a minute, you’ll start quoting Emerson.

DOC. That is a lousy thing to say!

ROBERTS. We’ve got nothing to do with the war. Maybe that’s why

we’re on this ship—because we’re not good enough to fight... .(see

page 115 above in this study for these remaining lines).

DOC. What is it you want to be — a hero or something? 120

ROBERTS. (Shocked.) Doc! Look, Doc, the war’s way out there! . . .I’m

here .... I’m sick and tired of being a lousy spectator. I’ve got to feel

I’m good enough to be in this thing — to participate!”

DOC. Good enough! Doug, you’re good enough! You just don’t have the

opportunity. That’s most what physical heroism is — opportunity.. . . ”

(Heggen and Logan 24)

This dialogue supports the notion of Doc’s character shift from the above cited complexities in the novel to the play as not quite the “hard-bitten ” as indicated by the stage directions, in a description also found in the book that feels more plausible in it

(Heggen and Logan 9). Doc also plays a softer or convivial role in the forged letter- signing contest as its judge in the play.

The paternal sentiment between Doc and Roberts that is apparent in the more defined masculine hierarchy between them in the play is also evident between Pulver and

Roberts in the play. Pulver is Roberts’s acolyte in the novel, but he is not cloyingly insecure as in the play. After Roberts teasingly tells Pulver he “almost deserves the fake

Scotch concoction Doc makes to compensate for Pulver for the Scotch Roberts took to the

Port Director, Pulver says, “You do—really? Or are you just giving me the old needle again? What do you really think of me, Doug—honestly?” (Heggen and Logan 20). In contrast, Pulver seems to have more of a sense of self in the novel and he doesn’t ask

Roberts this, even though he is clearly the follower. Again, as with Roberts and the

Captain, the dramatic stakes of masculinity are increased between the characters in the 121

play where the heightened level of sentiment further masculinizes Roberts at Pulver’s expense.

Further infantilizing Pulver in the play, Roberts says to Pulver later in the fake

Scotch scene, “Frank, you asked me what I thought of you. Well, I’ll tell you! The day you finish one thing you’ve started . . . the day you actually put those marbles in the

Captain’s overhead and then have the guts to knock on his door and say, ‘Captain, I put those marbles there,’ that’s the day I’ll have some respect for you—that’s the day I’ll look up to you as a man. Okay?” to which Pulver says “( ) Okay!” (Heggen and Logan 22). In addition to showing the power status difference between Roberts and

Pulver, the play lays out another part of Roberts’s prescription for manhood — finishing what one starts as well as standing up to tyranny and bullying. The novel also has a sentimental directive for manhood, but it isn’t as literally stated as in the play. At the close of the play, as well as the novel and movie, Pulver comes of age, finishing what

Roberts started by stepping into Roberts’s shoes as the individuated masculine advocate for freedom and individual rights, waging an ongoing battle against the Captain’s petty tyranny. The difference is that Pulver learns from the epiphany in Roberts’s letter that democratic heroism and bravery mean supporting noncombatant military fraternity, but not leaving the crew and escaping the Captain as Roberts did, dying in the process.

The other relevant gender representations, some of which become more conservative between the novel and the play, are related to women and sex. The subject of sex is always an opportunity for farce, particularly since sex was not readily available 122

during the war. Also, while sex before marriage occurred in midcentury America, it was considered taboo or reprehensible. In this atmosphere of public Puritanism and sexual anxiety, literary and stage humor didn’t have to go far to be provocative. For example,

Fussell describes Pulver’s prized dog-eared pornography book, God’s Little Acre, which is a 1933 book by Erskine Caldwell, as chaste by today’s standards. Porn magazines were not readily available at the time. These were the days prior to Playboy, Penthouse, or Hustler. Pin-ups of languorous girls with long legs and large pointy breasts in the era’s more demure bathing suits were emblematic of the times.

There are a few differences between the novel and the play with regard to women and sex. In the novel, a few men clearly have sex, whereas in the play, it is suggested as one of the rewards of the liberty leave, but it is not an evident occurrence as in the novel.

Heterosexuality is also strenuously and conventionally represented in the play, whereas homosexuality is suggested as a latent image in the novel. In these ways, the play seems to have more conservative values in its indirect representation of the occasion of sex compared to the novel, as well as in its watering-down of sex as violence and prostitution.

Prostitution and rape are also directly referenced in the novel, but indirectly alluded to in the play.

When Miss Gerard meets Roberts, she flirts with him, finding him more attractive than Pulver, which comically frustrates Pulver. He flirts back, confirming his representation as heterosexual, but he kindly lets Pulver keep his date with Miss Gerard.

Representing Roberts’s sexuality any further would seemingly complicate his character’s 123

all-consuming pursuit of patriotic heroism. The novel instead has a less direct reference to

Roberts’s heterosexuality in the scene with Dolan when Roberts expresses an asexual romantic fantasy that is intertwined with his hazy longing for “something else” or heroic combat. This is contrasted with Dolan’s hard-edged realism and misogyny. Roberts is thinking about “girls, the fine, straight, clean-limbed American girls in their tailored suits .

.. each talking with her escort. . . and the music that promised them bright and lovely and imperishable things . . . a girl was necessary . . . It was more than th at. . . what was it?”

(61). In contrast, Dolan, angry and critical, thinks to himself, “Why, you goddamn knucklehead! Who’re you trying to kid? The bars are so goddamn noisy you can’t yell from one table to the next. The women are a bunch of beasts with dirty bare legs and stringy hair. The boys are out for just on thing and that’s to get laid” (61).

In the novel, the pathos of loneliness and sexual deprivation is exposed in Dolan’s thoughts, along with his misogyny. In contrast, pathos in the play lies beneath the comedy of denial in the scenes of the shower, Pulver’s scotch, the liberty leave, and in jokes about

Pulver’s book. In this sense, the comedic meaning in the play can also be read as being similarly powerful as the novel’s more direct dramatic pathos as seen between Dolan and

Roberts. From this viewpoint, the play is not more conservative than the novel about sex, in that the play also represents the poignancy of sexual deprivation beneath the humor.

As the buffoon character, Pulver triggers laughs related to sex in the novel and its adaptations with his tall tales and comically botched conquest schemes. Miss Girard, the only female character in the otherwise all-male novel and play, who has a small role, 124

figures as a device to further the comedy by frustrating Pulver’s sexual appetite. In the novel and the adaptations, she graciously humors him from the start about his battle fatigue and about his claim to be the ship’s Executive Officer. She handles overhearing

Insigna’s bet about her birthmark with dignity and wit, outsmarting the loudmouthed

Insigna and the peeping men. In the various versions, while the women are described as merely naked bodies in the farcical shower scene; their faces are not clearly visible. Miss

Girard counters the conservative implications of these images in relation to the status of women as she becomes clearly individuated and specific rather than objectified.

The novel represents prostitution directly, comically, and liberally in the story about Doc treating Lindstrom for “the clap” (Heggen 43). It also comically depicts men testing the old prophylactics and Dolan reassuring the crew that “the girls are all very beautiful and promiscuous . . . [t]he prices ranged from one to six shillings” (134). In reality during the war, servicemen had to visit a prophylactic station immediately after using prostitutes, and acquiring a venereal disease was a punishable offense according to

Paul Fussell. The novel also directly and more liberally suggests the reality and threat of rape in contrast to the play. In the novel, the local police hold Schlemmer, although he is released from jail after his fine is paid since “his complainant could not be found to press charges” (146). The closest the play comes to suggesting rape is in the farcical drunken liberty scene, when the men storm an army dance. There are fifty “young ladies present” from “the finest families of Elysium,” whose “safety” the Colonel had “personally guaranteed” (Heggen and Logan 46). The military policeman informs Roberts: “Two of 125

those young ladies got somewhat mauled, one actually got a black eye, six of them got their clothes torn off and then went screaming off into the night and they haven’t been heard from since” (46).

The men who clearly have sex in the novel are the crewmen who sneak one native girl into their ship quarters for the days of the liberty; David Bookser, who has the affair with the island beauty for three days and nights; and Lindstrom who contracts venereal disease. Sex was not prohibited on the postwar Broadway stage or in theater performances that were accepted by the general public. For example, it was indirectly but clearly represented in South Pacific. Sex is sanitized in the play compared to the novel, but only to the extent that it is rendered as farce since the puritanical denial of sex in the play drives up the comic stakes of sexual deprivation.

Homosexual interest is not directly represented in the play. However, among the one hundred and seventy-six men aboard, homoerotic relationships would be expected.

The novel’s characterization of the young David Bookser suggests hidden sexual compensation for some of the men from the perspective of the period’s Freudian theory.

Additionally, known homosexuals were dishonorably discharged from the military at the time. Bookser is described in the novel as follows:

a beautiful boy ... a pure Adonis: his features were fine and flawless, and

his blond hair grew carelessly about his head in graceful ringlets. He did

not look effeminate, though, and the crew did not regard him that way. 126

They were a little stunned by his beauty, even the dullest clod of them, and

they made a sort of pet of Bookser. (Heggen 136).

The novel’s narrator says the men are “a little stunned by his beauty, even the dullest clod of them, and they made a sort of pet of Bookser” (Heggen 137). But Bookser’s sexual conquest of the rich island female beauty is the loftiest prize of the liberty leave in the novel’s version. Instead of a pet, he becomes not only a man, but also a heterosexual god to the crew. Again, in Freudian terms, subconscious relief is suggested by the comic reverence with which the crew idolizes Bookser once they confirm his heterosexuality.

Hyper-masculine heterosexual envy is also present. However, the play omits Bookser’s conquest and barely mentions him at all as just a young crewman.

The 1955 movie is similar to the play in plot and characterization. Value changes in the cultural implications of gender are not major with regard to masculinity between the play and the movie, since the central masculine conflict between Roberts and the

Captain is similarly represented. The older ages of the screen actors mitigates the believability of the masculine content between Roberts and the Captain in comparison to the play, where a younger man would be more likely to be naive and ardent about heroism. But the screen actors’ ages rise proportionately. The movie also cleans up the typical military profanity of the time, a requirement of the Navy since the film used Navy property. Profanity is more abundantly portrayed in the novel than the play, where it is sparse.

The episode of Bookser and the island beauty is restored from the novel to the 127

movie, albeit cleaned-up. He is characterized as a sweet, very young innocent man, with no references to how any of the other men feel about him. When Roberts tells Bookser he is surprised at Bookser’s behavior of staying out all night and almost missing the ship,

Bookser truthfully says he and the girl were only sitting on the beach and counting stars all night, “honest to god, that’s all” {Mister Roberts 1955).

Roberts’s easy confident smile at the nurses in the movie, as in the play, is again meant to signal his heterosexuality, although there is no other flirting. In addition to sex, the movie is also more conservative relative to the amplified “male gaze” on the screen, although sexual deprivation simultaneously renders it comic (Mulvey, reissued 2009).

The “male gaze” refers to Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay condemning the masculinization demanded in classical Hollywood cinema’s patriarchal bias, in which women were to be looked at as objects of desire by men, instead of being seen as individuals. In the movie, the camera’s and male characters’ views of the six tight- skirted, high-heeled nurses onboard instead of the play’s one less tightly clad and individuated nurse, Miss Girard, signify the “male gaze.”

IV. Conclusions

In its time, the play, Mister Roberts, expressed postwar triumphalism in fraternal nostalgia, but it also revealed heartbreak beneath the comedy about surviving wartime loneliness, boredom, and the constrictions on identity formation within the Navy. It also succeeded at being one of the first postwar Broadway plays that did not put a gloss on 128

military leadership in its more honest representation of bullying burned-out officers like

Captain Morton. However, its success has not been reaffirmed in revival. The 2005

Washington D.C. revival is not commensurate with a Broadway revival. But it is notable that although it was contextualized as part of the Center’s 1940s retrospective and had a short run, it was also considered a mildly subversive opportunity to represent the far more contentious Iraq war, according to the Kennedy Center’s president. In any case, the lack of reaffirmation in a successful major revival may be a function of the specific characteristics of the revival, or it may indicate that some of the paradoxes that the play reveals, given the distance of time, have already been fully absorbed or explored as we’ve moved past them.

As this chapter demonstrates, a close reading of the Mister Roberts adaptation process reveals the that the nature of these complex 1950s paradoxes is illuminated through the intersecting axes of gender and the political polarities of liberal and conservative forces. Roberts represents the interruption of traditionally gendered masculine individuality, which is a traditionally liberal value, through his epiphany about his pursuit of elite heroism of the “One.” The rupture is when he learns the value of heroic military conformity, which is a traditionally a conservative as well as feminine value, something he also teaches his acolyte, Pulver. Conformity, in the name of democratic patriotism, is the resolution. As such, it becomes associated with the democratized heroism of the noncombatant as the “Ordinary Man” in support of the fight against autocracy as totalitarianism in the Pacific war, as well as fascism implied in the 129

linked European war. The axes of gender and political polarities are upended when conservative conformity becomes associated with the masculine fraternity of democratized heroism associated with the “Ordinary Man.”

Increased conservativism has been shown through the higher stakes of hyper­ masculinity, particularly in the ramped-up battle between Roberts and the Captain and the conceit of the intensified nostalgic fraternity in the letter-signing contest. This conceit heightens the theme of political paradox by more closely tying Roberts’s epiphany to the democratic fraternity of the “Ordinary Man-as-hero.” The other conservative changes also amplify the political paradox, including the simplification and sentimentalization of

Doc’s character as more fraternal and nonintellectual; the increased infantilization of

Pulver; and the watered-down suggestions related to the occurrence of sex, prostitution, rape, and homoeroticism. The screen also adds the increased power of the “male gaze” and the isolation of the ship, further amplifying heroic democratized fraternity.

The amplification of hyper-masculinity and patriotism in the original stage adaptation of Mister Roberts — as well as the Hollywood movie, which was based on the stage version — also met the obvious commercial goal of capitalizing on the national sentiment of celebratory victory. The adaptations’ amplifications of conservative values made them an even safer bet for cashing in on and reinscribing conservative postwar nostalgia. This is particularly the case in the omission of references to socialist literature in the novel’s adaptation and in ramping up the “male gaze” in the movie. In this way,

Mister Roberts fits Philip Beidler’s paradigm of the commodification of collective myth 130

about America’s role in World War II through the iteration of postwar popular novels as successive stage and filmic adaptations.

In the end, while Mister Roberts is one of the few plays that both introduces satire about military leadership shortly after the war, but also conservatively valorizes heroic patriotism, the adaptation process reveals that traditional gender and political representations are broken apart and reorganized. Disrupted in adaptation, they increasingly reflect the complex paradox of the fifties where tensions brewed beneath the surface of the growing culture of conformity generated by the affluent postwar economy and fears related to the Cold War. Altogether, these meanings comprise the complicated legacy of Mister Roberts. 131

Chapter 3: The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial

I. Background

Herman Wouk’s acclaimed 1954 warship drama, The Caine Mutiny Court-

Martial, is better known than its predecessor, Mister Roberts. It ran for 415 performances at Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre, starring Henry Fonda as attorney Barney

Greenwald and Lloyd Nolan as Captain Queeg. Charles Laughton directed it. The play is based on the trial portion of Wouk’s 1951 best-selling Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,

The Caine Mutiny. Five months after the play opened, the equally celebrated Academy

Award winning 1954 movie, The Caine Mutiny, was released. Directed by Edward

Dmytryk, the screenplay was written by Stanley Roberts. Jose Ferrer played Greenwald and Humphrey Bogart played Queeg in an award-winning performance.

In 1955, CBS television produced it as an award-winning episode of the Ford Star

Jubilee live series. The BBC Sunday-Night Theatre also produced a television adaptation in 1958. The most recent filmic adaptation was the 1988 made-for-television version of the play that uses its title, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, directed by Robert Altman.

Eric Bogosian played Greenwald and Brad Davis played Queeg. The play was revived on Broadway at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in 2006, the implications of which will be addressed in this chapter. Jerry Zaks, who won the Drama Desk Award, directed the revival; David Schwimmer played Greenwald; and Zeljkp Ivanek, who played Queeg, 132

won a Tony Award and Drama Desk Award. The revival had a brief run of seventeen regular and twenty-seven preview performances.

This chapter will examine the adaptation process starting with the novel, moving to the Broadway play, the Hollywood movie, and ending with the 1988 Robert Altman film described below. Like South Pacific and Mister Roberts, the contention in this chapter is that the adaptation process reflects the cultural paradox of the fifties. Like

Mister Roberts, the fifties’ paradox can be seen through complex gender coding of hyper­ masculinity in relation to the largely all-male world of the World War II warship, and in this play, the all-male military tribunal. The novel and the Hollywood movie based on it suggest more conservative forces compared to the play. Altman’s filmic version of the play suggests a particularly paradoxical and more liberal understanding of the questions posed in the play.

Herman Wouk (1915 - ) was the first-born American child of Orthodox Jewish immigrants who had come to New York from Minsk, Russia. In New York, starting out in his basement, Herman’s father became president of a large New York laundry.

Herman was the neighborhood fat boy who got clobbered in fights. He retreated to the warmth of home and the world of books, writing poetry and developing an interest in drama. He attended secular school, including the prestigious Townsend Harris High for gifted students and daily Hebrew school. When Herman was thirteen, his grandfather,

Rabbi Mendel Levine, who was previously an important rabbi in Minsk, moved in and 133

took over Herman’s rigorous daily religious studies. Levine initiated what would become a life-long influence on his grandson.

Wouk attended Columbia University from 1930 to 1934, earning a B.A. in philosophy and comparative literature. There, away from his strong religious background for the first time, Wouk discovered modern liberal ideas as well as liberal Jews. In college, he briefly stopped his careful practice of Orthodox Judaism, which he would resume in 1940. Wouk said he returned to his Orthodox Judaism in 1940 as a result of

“only the crisis of living as an adult,” not because of any particular crisis

(www.time.com). Irwin Edman, a noted chair of the philosophy department, became

Wouk’s other lifelong mentor. Edman, a conservative individualist, railed against antiheroism and other aspects of what he considered the evils of modernism, which he saw as the flight from social responsibility. Wouk ultimately combined Orthodox

Judaism with Edman’s brand of “conservative humanism,” after which he never strayed from politically and morally conservative principles (Mazzeno 3).

At Columbia, Wouk’s enjoyment of his amateur success writing humor for varsity shows, a daily humor column in the college newspaper, and comic pieces for its literary magazine convinced him to pursue a career as a playwright. After college, Wouk worked as a gag writer for two years before landing a high-paying position with comedian Fred

Allen’s popular radio show. In 1941, he wrote radio scripts for the Defense Bond

Campaign. After Pearl Harbor, he completed Officer Candidate Training School at

Columbia University and Communications School at the U.S. Naval Academy. Wouk 134

served in the South Pacific on the USS Zane and later on the USS Southard, both destroyer-minesweepers. Wouk’s ships were in the U.S. naval fleet in historic engagements at Kwajalein, the Marshall Islands, Eniwetok, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, and the Marianas. Finally awarded the position of Executive Officer, the Southard got wrecked in a typhoon in Okinawa before Wouk could assume the command position.

In 1945, he married Betty Sarah Brown, a WAVE he had met the previous year.

She converted from nonpracticing Protestantism to Judaism, changing her name to Sarah

Batya Wouk. They had three sons, the oldest of whom tragically drowned at age five in a swimming pool in Cuernavaca when he slipped out of the house early one morning to sail a toy boat his father had given him.

Wouk wrote a total of twelve novels, including the third, The Caine Mutiny, which ensured his success. His other bestsellers were Marjorie Morningstar (1955) and

Youngblood Hawke (1962). In addition to The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, he wrote two plays, The Traitor (1949) and Nature’s Way (1957); a movie screen treatment,

Slattery’s Hurricane (1949); and two nonfiction books about Judaism. In his study of

Wouk’s life and work, Laurence Mazzeno writes that Wouk’s strength and his weakness as a writer were that he wrote for the postwar popular reading public using strong narrative lines and stories in which the general reader would find solace; he knew how to turn the war into what many people experienced as exciting entertainment. Mazzeno also notes that “respected literary doyens . . . have consistently castigated Wouk for a host of transgressions against literary good taste” (Preface ix). 135

In a 1951 review of the novel, Orville Prescott of the The New York Times said

The Caine Mutiny is intensely readable and engrossing with taut writing that compensates for its excessive length. He also said the novel is not didactic moralizing since the expert story telling is primary. On the other hand, in Maxwell Geismar’s book review in The

Nation, the critic satirically described Wouk’s theme as “Peace, Prosperity, and

Propaganda,” or conformity such that “all deviants from the norm, whether biological or esthetic or ethnic, will be tolerated as long as they do what they are told” (399-400).

The 1594 review of the Broadway play by Brooks Atkinson, The New York

Times, praised the play, describing it as lean, factual text, and a sparing set with minimum acting histrionics, but still “vividly dramatic because the material is full of tension” (Proquest Historical Newspapers, NYT, XI). He said that as “a self-contained piece of writing; it does not look like something artfully contrived out of another art form” (Ibid.). Regarding the meaning, Atkinson also said “there is no easy way out of the dilemma” raised in Wouk’s “trenchant” play (Ibid.). On the other hand, Laughton, who spent three months with Wouk to discuss courtroom dramaturgy prior to Wouk’s writing the play, said Wouk affirms respect for authority, reflecting Laughton’s sentiments (Peck Wilmington, NYT). Harold Clurman’s opinion about the 1954 play in

The Nation was unfavorable, except for his praise for the performances of Fonda and

Nolan. He argued that the play is skillful but “uncreative,” an “astonishingly convincing piece of reportage,” but not art since “hardly anything is shown which is more than an imitation of what we already know.” He also warned “whether [the play] does not 136

conceal what might be called a decrepit orthodoxy — the full implications of which are certainly anti-democratic” (138-129).

In Bosley Crowther’s 1954 movie review in The New York Times, he wrote that while the chafing naval officers under the neurotic captain’s command are exciting, the movie lacks cohesion (Proquest Historical Newspapers, NYT, XI). He said the movie does not clearly refine the dramatic issues or reveal character since the film script tries to be too faithful to the book. He also wrote that Keith’s romance is extraneous, and except for Keefer’s indictment, so is the court-martial, which ends up repeating the collapse of the Captain as previously shown in the storm.

The 2006 Broadway revival received mixed reviews, except for Ivanek’s acclaimed Queeg. Christopher Isherwood, The New York Times, said the torpid production undermined the enduring appeal of Wouk's story, and that Ivanek’s praised performance could not overcome the dry production. He questioned if today’s audiences, accustomed to slicker and quicker courtroom dramatizations on television and in Vietnam

War movies that well-represented the pathologies of combat duty, will be intrigued by

Wouk's deliberate, detail-packed presentation. He also said that 1954 pop culture was not familiar with the territory of jurisprudence. Matt Windham, writing for Playbill, said that director Jerry Zaks’ likely intentional flattening of Greenwald “reduces the tale of military morality (which has no civilian analogue) to one of near-insignificance.” Zaks contended that the play is set in a time when Americans were fighting a war that most people thought had to be fought, but now there is disagreement about the need for current 137

conflicts. However, he contended that the military is no less heroic than in 1945

(Windam). Zaks also said he thought the revival would resonate since people would want to live with these characters, and have curiosity about the workings of the military.

Rick Lyman, The New York Times, wrote in Robert Altman’s obituary that the

1988 television adaptation is strong. He noted that it restores the class conflict and anti-

Semitism that had been excised from the 1954 Hollywood movie. Howard Rosenberg,

Los Angeles Times, contended that Altman's staging oozes appealing texture and atmosphere, deftly contrasting Queeg and the tribunal. However, he also argued that the direction is pretentious and distracting, portraying a stationary event with a fidgety camera, overlaps, and conflicting attention, which blur and diffuse the story.

II. Description of the Novel and Adaptations

The novel is about possible officer insubordination aboard the U.S.S. Caine, an obsolete World War I destroyer that had been refurbished as a minesweeper in World

War II, the resulting court-martial, and the possible mental illness and cowardice of its petty tyrannical commander Captain Queeg. The lengthy novel, narrated in the third person, is melodramatic in overly emotional prose, but moderated by satire and irony.

The protagonist Willie Keith, a recent Princeton graduate in comparative literature, is initially a callow but polite, indulged son of an overbearing, wealthy entitled matron of

Mayflower descent and a “mild little doctor” father (10). He meets an Italian working- 138

class singer, May Wynn, whose real name is Maria Menotti. Willie’s mother is wary of such a marriage.

After enlisting in Reserve Midshipman School, Keith, a top student, is mortified by orders to report to the Caine. But as a result of a letter from his dying father telling his son that service on the Caine will make him strong, Willie reports to the Caine. On the ship, Keith meets Lieut. Steve Maryk, a competent good-natured sailor from a working- class fishing family. He also meets Lieut. Tom Keefer, Communications officer, a writer who is smug about the war, lacing his language with arrogant, cynical witticisms. In his bunk, crammed with modem literature and texts including Freud, Keefer works on his novel about the war instead of performing his officer tasks on the Caine.

Captain Queeg, a Navy “regular” who has not commanded this type of ship nor done minesweeping, tells everyone he is strictly a “by-the-book” man. He rolls two marble-sized steel ball bearings between his fingers, a nervous habit that becomes his signature gesture throughout the novel. Starting with his first day at command, Queeg makes costly, potentially dangerous mistakes he covers up by blaming the crew and officers. After Queeg causes a dock crash, he verbally attacks helmsman Stillwell who has pointed out that the Caine was on the wrong side of the channel. Next, Queeg disciplines crewman Urban for having visible shirttails, while giving an order to Stillwell that results in the ship running over and breaking its own towline. Refusing Maryk’s offer to retrieve the expensive target set adrift, Queeg says the gear is defective and not his responsibility, and then restricts Stillwell to the ship for six months to teach him not 139

to read on watch.

When the Caine is ordered to guide small island attack boats towards shore at

Kwajalein, Queeg orders dropping a dye marker too far from the beach that stains the water yellow, speeding too far ahead for the small craft to keep up. He then orders a hasty retreat to avoid gunfire from the island, abandoning the boats with marines in the choppy water. Keefer coins the epithet, “Old Yellowstain” to Maryk’s disapproval,

(240).

After Queeg lays down several new oppressive edicts, convinced his officers are disloyal, Keefer suggests to Maryk that Queeg has a psychopathic personality with paranoia and obsessive-compulsive syndrome. Maryk, who has been promoted to the ship’s Executive Officer, reads about mental disorders and begins a secret medical log of the Captain’s increasing oppressions. This includes a lengthy list of ridiculous as well as sadistic punishments as follows: incarcerating sailors, putting officers under hack, stopping movies for six months, cutting off water at the equator, making endless demands for written reports or investigations, keeping the officers in session for forty-eight hours straight trying to find out which mess boy burned out a coffee machine, and waking up officers for conferences in the middle the night. Keefer also suggests to Maryk that

Queeg may be homosexual; Queeg is described in the novel as naked in front of officers whom he calls into his cabin for conferences, and also ordering a strip search over a trifle.

At the battle of Saipan, Queeg runs to the opposite side of the bridge exposed to the beach’s gunfire. He also starts an absurd investigation about who stole a small 140

amount of strawberries from the padlocked icebox, including issuing orders to obtain, label, and try 2,800 potential icebox keys. Keefer again suggests to Maryk that Queeg is insane, asking Maryk if he is familiar with court-martial articles about responsibility in the unusual circumstance of removal of command. Keefer first agrees to join Maryk to talk to Admiral Halsey about Queeg, but then gets cold feet. Keefer warns Maryk that the Navy will consider them mutinous reserves and angrily tells Maryk he's hanging himself. Maryk doesn’t go through with it since he was depending on Keefer to talk about the psychiatric issues, telling Keefer these were his ideas from the start since

Maryk had never before heard of the psychiatric terminology.

In a harrowing typhoon, the fleet turns southward for safety and Queeg sets the same course. Queeg panics, clings strangely to the telegraph, and is unable to speak.

When he regains his voice, he disagrees with Maryk’s vehement but respectful urging that the ship is in danger and must turn north into the wind. Keith supports Maryk, as does the terrified Stillwell. Queeg tells them they are under arrest. Maryk, still respectful, tells Queeg, “Captain, I'm sorry, sir, you're a sick man. I am temporarily relieving you of the ship, under article 184 of Navy ” (339). Maryk assures the officers he is solely responsible, and tells them to treat Queeg with the utmost courtesy.

Maryk’s court-martial takes place for the un-authorized relief of Queeg. Lieut.

Commander Challee, the prosecuting attorney, suggests Barney Greenwald for the defense after eight lawyers, Navy “regulars”, have turned the case down in fear for their 141

naval careers. Greenwald, a reserve pilot, is described as a red-hot lawyer for the underdog. Breakstone, the district legal officer, concerned that Greenwald is a Jew and may also be a Communist, needs an attorney and gives Greenwald the case.

On the stand, Queeg first appears confident, courteous, and firm when Challee begins the questioning. Queeg’s position is that Maryk unexpectedly panicked, became irrational, and tried to seize command, but that he, Queeg, brought the ship safely through the typhoon. The prosecutor focuses on Maryk and Keith’s insubordination, and the ludicrousness of less experienced officers judging an experienced captain’s orders. Using two naval psychiatrists as witnesses who observed Queeg in the hospital, Challee gets them to validate their reports of Queeg’s well-adjusted personality. Southard, an expert witness in seamanship, says the ship was not endangered and could have remained on a southward course. Keefer is evasive. Stillwell, not at the trial, is getting shock treatment for acute melancholia at the base hospital. The terrified young Urban who had visible shirttails, evades a direct statement that the Captain acted crazy during the typhoon.

When it is the defense side’s turn, Greenwald skillfully and methodically undoes the lies and evasions perpetrated during Challee’s questioning, proving Queeg’s lack of fitness to command, to the amazement of the justices and the fury of the prosecution.

Greenwald gets the two unwittingly comic psychiatrists to admit that Queeg is sick with an obsessive personality that has paranoid features. Maryk says Queeg was usually okay, except under great pressure when he became mentally disabled. Urban describes how

Queeg blamed Stillwell, revealing the origins of the epithet, “Old Yellowstain.” 142

Southard admits that in the last extremity, he would have headed north into the wind.

Greenwald does not question Keefer. Keith describes how Queeg demonstrated the extent of what can be done to oppress and maltreat within regulations, citing the long list of edicts and punishments. Keith also describes Queeg’s repeated fleeing from shore batteries and how Queeg extorted money from him over Queeg’s illegally transported liquor crate, a comic episode in the novel. Maryk tells how Queeg tried to blackmail him into agreeing to forget the whole typhoon episode and to falsify official logs.

When Greenwald calls Queeg as a witness for the defense, Queeg starts out calmly. But as Greenwald breaks him down, Queeg takes out and nervously rolls his two steel balls. In a rambling speech lasting about eight minutes in which he hardly pauses for breath, Queeg jumps between subjects and time periods, becoming increasingly incoherent as he lists his grievances against the officers. Greenwald strolls to his desk and leans against it, listening respectfully as the court members stare at Queeg. When

Queeg finally stops, Greenwald asks Queeg to read his two highly laudatory fitness reports about Maryk, which Queeg does in a choked voice.

Challee’s closing argument is based on the notion of the defense’s position as a blank check for mutiny in the Navy and the absolute destruction of the chain of command. Greenwald appears humble and apologetic in his closing argument, saying he was reluctant to take the case, that it has been a most unpleasant duty, and that it was never his intention to prove Queeg a coward. He says the entire case of the defense rests on the opposite assumption that no man who rises to command a U.S. naval ship can 143

possibly be a coward. Maryk is acquitted.

Keefer throws a party to celebrate the contract for his novel where the Caine officers are jubilant about the acquittal. Keefer invites Greenwald as the hero of the hour.

But Greenwald arrives late and drunk, and proceeds to indict the Caine officers for not supporting their commander to continue to fight the war. Greenwald talks about how

Queeg and men like him saved his mother from Hitler’s death camps, claiming the legal verdict was a miscarriage of justice. Calling Keefer the Caine mutiny’s author, he tells

Keefer he defended Maryk because he found out the wrong man was on trial, and the only way to defend Maryk was to sink Queeg for Keefer. Greenwald says he's angry and ashamed at what he had to do, and throws his glass of yellow wine in Keefer’s face, a little of which splashes on Keith.

In the novel’s post-trial exposition, we learn that Maryk and Queeg are each sent to the humiliating command of land supply depots, which ends Maryk’s dream of a naval career. Keefer becomes captain of the Caine, and Keith, the executive officer. Keith runs the ship when Keefer retires in isolation to write his novel since everyone heard about Keefer’s book party. A Kamikaze hits the Caine and the terrified Keefer jumps overboard, clutching his novel in a sack. Willie takes control of the ship, puts out the fire, deals with the dead, and rescues those who jumped overboard, including Keefer.

Keith helps the shocked and wounded Keefer save face by telling him it was not an act of cowardice. Keith successfully commands the ship through a typhoon and back to the

States for decommissioning, where he gets a bronze Star for saving the ship. But when 144

Maryk’s acquittal is disapproved, he also gets a letter of reprimand about the Queeg case.

The play is based on the courtroom and party episodes. It omits the pre- and post­ trial exposition as well as Keith’s relationship with his family and May Wynn. The play does not reverse Maryk’s acquittal as does the novel, and it omits the outcome of Queeg’s and Maryk’s naval careers. The play opens with Maryk nervously waiting with

Greenwald for the trial to begin; there is no prior exposition about Breakstone. In the play, Blakely incorporates Breakstone’s character with regard to Greenwald’s

Jewishness, although Blakely does not tell Challee that he’s concerned that Greenwald may also be a communist. The play closes with the crux of Greenwald’s drunken speech and his staggering out of the party after his satiric toast of Keefer as in the novel’s episode. Queeg’s insinuated homosexuality is toned down in the play.

The original 1954 Hollywood movie uses only some key language and lines from the play and novel. It compresses the novel’s sub-plot about Keith’s romance and tones down his separation from his mother and her class snobbery. His father has died before the action starts so there is no sentimental letter. Like the play, the movie ends without the novel’s disapproval of the acquittal, and there is no mention of what happens to

Maryk or Queeg after the trial. Other changes made in the movie adaptation are described below in the analysis. The 1988 Robert Altman adaptation is based on the play and largely follows the stage script, but has directorial values that change the ending as described in the analysis. 145

III. Analysis of Gender

The ideas and expectations of midcentury gender analysis offer a lens through which to examine postwar culture in the adaptation process of the play, The Caine Mutiny

Court-Martial, as demonstrated in the previous chapter’s approach to Mister Roberts.

The two plays have much in common. Because Wouk’s play is also a World War II play like Heggen and Logan’s, the principal focus of this gender analysis is through masculinity and how it informs the changing cultural politics of the fifties. Characters in

Wouk’s novel and adaptations can be understood along classically codified gender qualities using feminist and gender theory as previously identified in the Mister Roberts chapter, although, as in the previous chapter, these do not split precisely along traditional lines.

This analysis looks at how masculinity is produced in the novel, the original 1954

Broadway, the 1954 Hollywood movie, and 1988 Robert Altman film. Like in the preceding chapter, the contention here is that in The Caine Mutiny adaptation process, gender as masculinity is complexly coded, reflecting tensions between conformity and individual freedom inherent in the paradox of the 1950s and the Cold War era. Again, as in Mister Roberts, the ordinary intersection between gender dualities and political polarities is one in which the axis of masculine and conservative is joined in opposition to the feminine and liberal. In the versions of the narrative discussed in this chapter, combined with the representation of the fifties’ paradox, the period’s masculine and conservative forces are ultimately the stronger values in the broad outcomes of the 146

narratives. However, by focusing on the court-martial and omitting the action on the ship before and, in particular, after the trial, the play and Altman’s film based on it clarify and heighten the fifties’ paradox in comparison to the novel and the Hollywood movie. The novel and the Hollywood movie are more traditionally conservative, and the Hollywood movie has the strongest of these values of the four versions discussed.

Wouk’s Preface says that his novel hinges on the protagonist Willie Keith’s transformation as follows: “The story begins with Willie Keith because the event turned on his personality as the massive door of a vault turns on a small jewel bearing” (xiii). In the novel, the plot about Keith’s private life outside the Caine bookends the naval ship plot and is interwoven in sections about his service on the Caine. It isn’t until his father’s imminent death and his apologetically sentimental letter to his son that Willie realizes he will join the Caine, giving up the offer of his mother’s connections to a safe billet playing piano at the Officers’ Club in Pearl Harbor. The letter urges Willie to follow his heart with marriage and a career instead of the lure of class status as his father had mistakenly pursued. It also sentimentalizes how Willie symbolizes the potential of a young America.

Willie’s maturation outside the military is a result of his father’s urging him to become a man within it. The masculine and conservative idea that the military made boys into men is one of the thematic gender and political values of the novel and its adaptations. It is related to the traditional or conservative theme of authority. While in partisan terms, conservatives wanted to stay out of global affairs and the quintessential liberal administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt led us into World War II, historical 147

conservative patriarchy is the broader context within which war has been made and young soldiers purportedly have been made into men. Willie’s father’s letter in the novel is long. The ellipses in the quote from the letter as follows are necessary in order to capture its meaning regarding the nature of this father-son relationship, Willie’s relationship with his mother, and Dr. Keith’s instructions for manhood, without taking several pages here to do so:

I’ve let slide my relationship with you as I have so many other things,

through plain sloth; particularly since your mother seemed so anxious to

take charge of you.. . . though you are pretty spoiled and soft at the

surface, you are tough enough at the core... . you’re very much like our

whole country—young, naive, spoiled and softened by abundance and good

luck, but with an interior hardness that comes from your stock.. . . I know

you are disappointed at having been sent to a ship like the Caine..You

need some stone walls to batter yourself against. I strongly suspect you’ll

find them there on the Caine.. . . Had I had one such experience in my

younger years, I might not be dying a failure.. . . be kind to (your mother)

if you come back from the war with enough strength to break away from

her... for the sake of the father who took the wrong turns, take the right

ones . . . Good-by, my son. Be a man. Dad. (59-62)

Wouk’s novel and play were written at the height of Freudian psychology’s influence, as Keefer’s bookshelf and the Freudian psychiatric testimony at the trial 148

evidence. Although Wouk satirizes Freud as described below, in the novel’s letter from

Dr. Keith, the Freudian paradigm provides the period’s context through which Willie’s maturational trajectory can be understood. Willie leaves his mother in order to psychologically join with his father by healing his own and his father’s masculine wounds. The Navy is central in his transition since Willie learns the purported lessons of masculine authority on the ship and in the military courtroom. The military and the courts are joined as traditional symbols of patriarchy where the power and laws of men are contested as well as protected. The military courtroom therefore signifies conservative and masculine values or traditional patriarchy under which Willie comes of age.

The courtroom drama effectively recapitulates the necessary exposition from the novel’s real time naval episodes through court testimony. Greenwald becomes the protagonist in the action of the play instead of Willie Keith as in the novel, who has a much smaller role in the play. Greenwald’s rebuke issued at Keefer’s post-trial party contains the novel and its adaptation’s moral verdict. This is Greenwald’s personal judgment or moral lesson that there are instances when it is necessary and socially responsible to support authority for the greater good. By omitting the novel’s extensive exposition of the Caine action, the secondary plot about Keith’s incorporation of the moral verdict, as well as his personal life, the play amplifies the novel’s masculine values in the trial’s outcome and in the paradoxical implications of the drama of Greenwald’s powerful legal and moral victories. Greenwald’s complex identities complicate this 149

masculine coding in the party scene, which is the denouement.

From the beginning of the play, Greenwald appears to exhibit traditionally coded masculinity in his drive, confidence, and power as a lawyer that becomes amplified as hyper-masculinity. This increasingly occurs as the legal and moral verdict unfold revealing Greenwald’s prowess relative to the self-assured prosecution team, which assumes victory since it has the military behind it. At the party, the scene of the moral verdict, Greenwald’s hyper-masculinity is clearly evident in the righteousness that seems to give him masculine superiority over other officers, but it belies underlying conflict and vulnerability.

At the start of the play, Greenwald’s hyper-masculinity is suggested after the nervous Maryk says that maybe he should plead guilty because eight other lawyers told him to do so, when Greenwald says, “I don’t care if every legal officer in the Navy says otherwise, I think I can get you off’ (11). Greenwald also says he’s “the best damned lawyer....” (Ibid.). There seems to be no situation Greenwald cannot handle and has not anticipated in the trial. His confidence borders on arrogance as he cleverly performs blase control as a courtroom tactic to leverage his genuine competence, which includes comically doodling on a scratch pad instead of obviously watching the prosecution’s questioning.

The use of the novel’s courtroom episode is particularly dramatic for the midcentury theater audience relatively unaccustomed to seeing the courtroom, as cited earlier in Isherwood’s review. Courtroom dynamics have built-in conflict between 150

opposing sides and the issues they represent, which is the material of drama. In the play,

Greenwald’s character as the outsider or the defense counsel in a case heavily stacked against him further increases the dramatic stakes of the courtroom drama. The victory elevates Greenwald’s masculinity, regardless of his being on the defense side since the

Navy needs him to take the job. Although the play’s Blakeley tells Greenwald, “this has been a strange and tragic trial,” he also compliments him, saying “[y]ou have conducted your case with striking ingenuity” (88).

The following is an example in the play of Greenwald’s legal prowess that codes his masculinity as hyper-masculine during and after the trial, albeit this is also a part of the strategy of his profession as a litigator. In the example, Greenwald proves that the prosecution’s naval psychiatry witness is not qualified to determine the stresses on naval captains after establishing that the doctor has not been at sea, nor dealt with naval commanders:

GREENWALD. On what do you base your estimate of the stresses of

command?

BIRD. Well, my general knowledge—

GREENWALD. Do you think command requires a highly gifted,

exceptional person.

BIRD. Well, no—

GREENWALD. It doesn’t?

BIRD. Not highly gifted, no. Adequate responses, fairly good 151

intelligence, and sufficient training and experience, but—

GREENWALD. Is that enough equipment for, say, a skilled

psychiatrist?

BIRD. Well, not exactly—

GREENWALD. In other words, it takes more ability to be a

psychiatrist than the captain of a naval vessel?

BIRD. It takes— (He catches himself, and glances toward

BLAKELEY.) That is, different abilities are required. You’re

making the invidious comparison, not I.

GREENWALD. Doctor, you’ve admitted Command Queeg is sick.

The only remaining question is, how sick. You don’t think he’s sick

enough to be disabled from command. I suggest that since evidently

you don’t know much about the requirements of command you

may be wrong in your conclusion.

BIRD. (Looking like an insulted boy, his voice quivers.) I repudiate

your suggestion. You’ve deliberately substituted the word, sick,

which is a loose, a polarized word, for the correct— (55-56)

After a few more parries along these lines, Challee objects, saying Greenwald is badgering the witness, but Greenwald withdraws his last statement because he knows he’s won a key point. This scene is conservative from a satiric point of view. It comically attacks modem psychiatry’s lowered masculine status relative to the Navy’s 152

since psychiatry deals with the traditionally coded inner or feminine and therefore liberal world of emotion and related suspect ideas about behavior. The implication is that psychiatrists are not traditional men engaging in the real or masculine world of action and contest as physical power, in which Greenwald participates as a fighter pilot. Of course, lawyers, particularly Jewish lawyers, like the disproportionate number of Jewish psychiatrists, are likewise seen as culturally effeminate due to the intellectual and indoor nature of their endeavors.

Greenwald, however, is a character who expresses, embodies, and amplifies the paradox of the fifties as a fighter pilot who is also a Jewish lawyer. Wearing his military uniform in court as a naval lawyer changes his coding of the law profession, masculinizing it, visually representing the contradictions of individuality beneath conformity in his complex identities. Additionally, the aggressive way Greenwald operates in the courtroom mirrors his job as a fighter pilot, challenging the effeminacy with which that position would be normally coded. For example, Blakeley shows more sympathy for Greenwald after Blakeley learns Greenwald was recently hospitalized for third degree burns from a flying accident, although Greenwald has to tell Blakeley when asked that he crashed a barrier landing on a ship (34).

When Greenwald tells Blakeley about this barrier crash, Greenwald satirically subverts his own important masculine status as a fighter pilot. Greenwald knows he can subvert his own pilot status without concern since he is so brilliant in this case compared to the prosecution, that he astounds the military. Such ironic self-effacement also 153

reverses Greenwald’s effeminate coding as the underdog’s defense attorney, re-coding him as masculine. This also signifies the fifties’ paradoxical tensions of individuality and conformity because Greenwald represents conformity to the Navy while individually subverting his role in it. Greenwald is also hyper-masculine in relation to his need to dominate through his brilliant litigating as a compensation for his outsider status among career military officers like Blakeley and Challee.

Another example of the fifties’ paradox represented by hyper-masculinity is seen when Greenwald gets Dr. Bird, who is testifying for the prosecution, to inadvertently subvert the military. Greenwald asks Bird, “You say his (Queeg’s) military career is a result of his disturbance?” to which Bird unwittingly and comically answers, “[m]ost military careers are” (54). Greenwald is again reversing his own effeminate coding, but this time, at Bird’s expense by uncovering to the military how another vulnerable male in an “effeminate” field supposedly representing the military, unwittingly negates it.

The above scene with Bird suggests another critical layer to Greenwald’s complex hyper-masculinity, or his vulnerability as a Jewish “egghead” or intellectual. As noted in the Mister Roberts chapter, this is the era of the anti-“egghead” idea when Eisenhower, formerly General Eisenhower in World War II, leveraged the idea to emasculate Adlai

Stevenson in his two liberal bids for president. In the scene with Bird, Greenwald wins an argument against a psychiatrist, ostensibly an equal “egghead,” even though Bird loses this particular contest. Greenwald anti-“eggheads” himself by making Bird look overly fragile or bird-like as Greenwald outwits and emasculates him. 154

As the case turns in Greenwald’s favor, the dramatization of his assured masculine prowess and his complicated hyper-masculinity dominate the powerful realm of legal and military men on stage. Because it is theater, spectators share the emotions of characters, in this instance, identifying with Greenwald in successfully taking on the

Navy. In the play, the fact that the court does not reverse Greenwald’s legal triumph as in the novel, further increases the dramatic rewards of Greenwald’s legal victory over

Navy tradition, amplifying the fifties’ paradox. However, the novel is more realistic in reversing the acquittal, dampening the paradox in a more conservative outcome.

Blakeley admonishes Greenwald at the conclusion of the trial, identifying the masculine and conservative responsibility Wouk ultimately endorses in the denouement, saying the following: “[w]ith talent goes responsibility. Has your conduct here been responsible, Lieutenant Greenwald? The reprimand, if there’s to be one, must come from your own conscience” (88/ Intoned is one of the play’s conservative themes that manhood implies responsible authority.

Authoritarianism is certainly part of the liberal/conservative axis in this period when, for example, Hitler and Mussolini used tyrannical authority associated with fascism. In Blakely’s admonishment, responsibility implies the conservative aspect of supporting masculine authority to get the job done by focusing on the result of winning the war. However, complicating the conservative notion of authority is the fact of

Maryk’s acquittal and that our only four-term president, Roosevelt, was the author of the liberal New Deal. Further complicating it in terms of the broad traditional gender coding 155

paradigm, this type of conservative responsibility to authority is traditionally feminine, since playing a support role to shore up weak or unjust authority is antithetical to masculine independence and leadership. The axes of political polarities and traditionally coded gender are again disrupted and reorganized as in Mister Roberts, such that masculine and conservative fuse in opposition to the feminine and liberal axes.

The theme of conservatively responsible authority is secured in the novel’s denouement and its post-trial exposition where Keith completes the journey to Wouk’s brand of mature masculinity. Life after the trial and Keefer’s party is humiliating for

Queeg, Maryk, and Keefer, but not for Executive Officer Keith. By internalizing

Greenwald’s lesson — which Maryk will not have a chance to do and which Keefer cannot because of his personality — Keith becomes the standard bearer of moral authority and social responsibility when he shores up the weak Captain Keefer and gets a

Bronze Star for saving the ship. We learn that Keith realizes he deserved his letter of reprimand about the Queeg case when he tells May his side was in the wrong. Wouk’s brand of authority also may be evident when Keith tells May he wants to teach at a small rural college and she’ll raise a family, without considering her singing career or separate interests, further coding Keith’s 1950s manhood as conservative and masculine.

The play’s contrastingly more dramatic and paradoxical ending with Greenwald’s moral excoriation includes the small group of stunned and shamed Caine officers on whom the curtain closes. Greenwald is now clearly the hyper-masculine focal point around which the officers of the Caine are coded as feminine in their disgrace. Keefer is 156

the male character most directly emasculated by his cowardice for letting Maryk do his dirty work. Keefer is also represented as a hypocrite for using rebellion against authority in his writing instead of manning up to it like Greenwald does in relation to Greenwald’s own role in Maryk’s acquittal. Greenwald swipes at Keefer’s masculinity when he references Keefer’s modernist intellectual literary tastes in the speech as quoted below.

Ironically mocking Keefer’s novel, Greenwald says it “gives the war a good pasting”

(92). In a direct reference to Keefer’s feminine coding, Greenwald tells Keefer the following in his toast at the party: “Here’s to you. You bowled a perfect score. You went after Queeg and got him. You kept your own skirts all white and starchy” (94-95).

Gender coding as hyper-masculinity is complex when Greenwald morally castigates the rebellious officers in the denouement. On the one hand, Greenwald represents Wouk’s view of “real” manhood as responsible authority, or the responsibility to know when to lead and when to support weak leaders. On the other hand, the fact remains that Greenwald achieved a legitimate acquittal for Maryk by indicting Queeg as unfit to command. Greenwald is deeply troubled by his inability to reconcile the contradictions. But in the play, there is none of the post-trial heroic male melodrama represented by Keith as in the novel. The following is excerpted from Greenwald’s key speech at the party in the play:

See, the Germans aren’t kidding about Jews. They’re cooking us

down to soap over there. They think we’re vermin and should be

‘sterminated and our corpses turned into something useful. . . But I 157

just can’t cotton to the idea of my mom melted down to a bar of soap..

.. See, Mr. Keefer, while I was studying law, and you were writing

your short stories for national magazines, and little Willie here was on

the playing fields of Princeton, why, all that time these birds we call

regulars, these stuffy stupid Prussians, they were standing guard on

this fat, dumb, and happy country of ours.. . . who was keeping Mama

out of the soap dish? .. . Old Yellowstain, maybe? Why yes, even poor

sad Queeg. And most of them not sad at all, fellows, a lot of them

sharper boys than any of us, don’t kid yourself, you can’t be good in

the Army or Navy unless you’re goddam good. Though maybe not up

on Proust, ‘n’ Finnegan’s Wake, ‘n’ a ll.. . . I defended Steve because I

found out the wrong guy was on trial. Only way I could defend him

was to murder Queeg for you. I’m sore that I was pushed into that

spot, and ashamed of what I did, and thass why I’m drunk. Queeg

deserved better at my hands. (93-94)

Greenwald doubly emasculates Keith as “little Willie,” a joke cycle from the 1930s and a phallic slur, and by referencing Keith as a privileged child at play in the elite playgrounds of the Ivy League and officer training school. The implicit contrast is to Queeg, who worked his way up as a “regular.” Additionally, Greenwald tells Maryk in the same scene that Maryk is guilty. Greenwald tells Maryk, “[cjourse, you’re only half guilty,” since

Keefer used Maryk. This emasculates Maryk for being weak and allowing himself to be 158

used, particularly by a coward. The bottom line is that for siding against the Navy and

Queeg, Keefer, Maryk and Keith are coded as feminine.

In the gender paradigm of this study, Greenwald’s stance as the tough Jewish lawyer taking on the Navy in the trial becomes an equally tough but also paradoxical hyper-masculine stance in the speech. He is playing an aggressive individualistic leadership role in his rebuke, attempting to force the officers to see that they must support their leader, Queeg, if they are to be responsible men. But beneath Greenwald’s legal victory, the moral reversal contains a complex weaving of feminine and masculine gender coding. Greenwald’s Jewishness is a factor in his inability to fully reconcile the traditional masculine attribute of independence with the dependence inherent in military conformity to authority.

Literary scholar Edward S. Shapiro contends that Wouk advocates for unquestioning conformity to authority instead of describing the military experience as dehumanizing, from the perspective of Wouk’s need as a Jew to conflate American and

Jewish destinies (2, 6). Although this chapter posits that Wouk advocates for authority in a conservative sense, Wouk is not advocating for “unquestioned” conformity to authority as Shapiro states. However, this chapter concurs with Shapiro’s point about Wouk’s conflation of American and Jewish destinies, applying this idea to Greenwald’s hyper­ masculinity or to how his being a Jewish American complicates his masculinity. The extents to which the legal and moral resolutions proceed as they do in the play reflect

Greenwald’s vulnerability as a Jewish Other. At the time, feelings ran high about Jews. 159

Otherness and the vulnerability it represents are coded as feminine in the context of white male Christian dominance in midcentury American culture. Jews were also simultaneously victims of the Holocaust as well as heroes of Israeli independence in

1948, suggesting the paradox of vulnerability and strength reflected in the gender binary, which ties to paradoxical political polarities.

Wouk establishes Greenwald’s ethnic vulnerability in the play before the denouement when Challee uses Greenwald’s Jewishness to discredit and emasculate him.

When the prosecutor requests that Greenwald be reprimanded for contempt of court,

Challee also says, “this court won’t approve such shyster tactics” (87). Blakely denies the request for reprimand and calls the remark an “unfortunate personal slur,” although

Blakely doesn’t have it struck from the record (88). While Challee’s slur implies that

Greenwald wins with underhanded tactics because he is a Jew, it also suggests

Greenwald’s hyper-masculine compensation for his vulnerability as a Jew in the fight to preserve his people, and by extension, others in need of justice. He compensates because he has to be aggressively successful in his masculinity to achieve professional victories in his work on behalf of the Other. He has to break the ethnic glass ceiling that existed for

Jews in America at the time in the military and in other traditional institutional bastions of while male Christian power because he is known for defending Indian rights.

The novel’s references to Greenwald as a Jew represent the link between anti-

Semitism and anti-communism related to the conservative Cold War era notion that Jews who defended underdogs were communists. A disproportionate number of American 160

communists, though, were Jews; it was not just a matter of defamation. In the novel the concern about this is evident in an exchange between Breakstone and Challee. When

Breakstone asks about Greenwald’s name after learning that he is a Jew, the narrator describes Breakstone’s reaction as follows: “Captain Breakstone wrinkled his big nose”

(349). After Breakstone states he doesn’t have anything against Jews, Challee says the following about Greenwald: he’s “odd in a way. Very odd. I’m used to him ... Barney is interested as hell in Indian cases. You might say he’s nuts on the subject” (349-350).

When Breakstone also hears that Barney was not in ROTC, he says, “[sjounds like he might be a pinko” (350). But this concern seems to evaporate as Greenwald’s legal prowess dominates the arena.

While contextually legitimate given the disproportionate number of American

Jewish communists, Challee’s and Breakstone’s remarks are also intended to discredit and emasculate Greenwald as an outsider in the masculine club of insider naval legal officers. Greenwald’s Jewish identity and his hyper-masculinity reflect the play’s moral dilemma. It raises the question of the meaning of responsibility or the limits of authority in general as well as in relation to military autocracy in wars against autocracy as totalitarianism, communism, and fascism. For Wouk, clearly, there are times when autocracy is justified in war, even though it will also be shown that Wouk may not think

Queeg should remain in command.

The period’s well-known journalist William H. Whyte saw Wouk’s novel as representing unquestioned support for authority, and as “an astounding denial of 161

individual responsibility” (271). Whyte also saw Wouk’s rationale as a Jew about the need to support the Navy and its career officers at all costs because without them, the

Nazis would not be defeated, as an irrelevant climax. Contemporary Cold War cultural scholars analyze the tremendous prestige the military enjoyed in addition to its lack of challenge in the 1950s. Cold War scholar Stephen Whitfield pointed out that it was the only decade in the century in which a general was elected, and the subject of peace, even in sermons, was worrisome as it was considered communistic (59). In line with Whyte’s position from the fifties, Whitfield’s opinion is evident in the following: “ . . . Wouk told an interviewer in 1972, what had begun as a panoramic war novel switched into ‘a novel about authority versus responsibility.’ This counterpoint is puzzling. For Wouk seemed to take the side of authority against responsibility, leaving unexplained why—in defense of democracy—blind obedience warranted a higher priority than individual conscience and independent judgment during a crisis” (61). The contemporary Cold War scholar

Michael Rogin similarly argued that the novel says “[Wjhen the fathers lack authority, we must subordinate ourselves to the military state” (257), and that the novel justifies the

Cold War (255).

Bruce McConachie, also a Cold War scholar, took the iconoclastic position that the play “stretch[es] a Fragmented hero between reluctant commitment to human law and a yearning for final justice that could only come through the intervention of an Almighty power” (213). In contrast, the analysis in this chapter argues for the interpretation of cultural and political paradox, not spiritual paradox. Greenwald’s moral indictment 162

seems to imply a moral yearning for an ideal fraternal community that can find a way to support weak authority for a greater goal if it cannot justly replace such authority, but at the same time remain free and democratic.

Whitfield and Rogin’s stand on Wouk as a conservative without complexity are contrary to the position in this chapter that the play’s conservativism is more complicated and paradoxical. This chapter holds that simultaneous to Wouk’s ultimately conservative viewpoint on authority, Wouk raises the question of the inherent tension between conformity and individuality represented by the paradox of the fifties. The 1972 interview above says Wouk thinks his novel is “ ‘about authority versus responsibility;’ ”

Wouk did not say it is a novel about authority against responsibility as Whitfield infers.

In disagreement with Whyte, this chapter also argues that Greenwald’s rationale as a Jew is relevant since it is inextricably linked with the paradox of Greenwald’s hyper­ masculinity. Philip Beidler’s position is also close to this chapter’s view on the complexity of the fifties’ paradox, although he didn’t specifically weigh in on the dilemma in the novel, instead saying it is “a complex intellectual critique of the wartime politics of command” (132).

World War II veteran and historian Paul Fussell argued that “[i]t is notable how much of the writing from the Second World War tends not so much to convey news from the battlefield as to expose the chickenshit lurking behind it. (The exception is popular fiction like that of Leon Uris and Herman Wouk. Their audience being untrained in irony, in their novels, especially Wouk’s over-produced ones, there are few blunders and errors 163

and everyone does what he’s supposed to do, with minimal chickenshit. Result:

Victory.)” (83). That analysis, when applied to The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, over­ simplifies Greenwald, Queeg, and the Caine officers and their relationships regarding knowing what to do, let alone the claim about the inability of the fifties’ Broadway audience as monolithic in its inability to see irony. How the fifties’ audience evaluated the irony is related to a number of things, including education, their broader political values, their experience in the war, and the extent to which they were influenced by Cold

War fears.

In Lawrence Mazzeno’s study on Wouk, he persuasively argued that Wouk’s strident conservative views make many critics and literary scholars uncomfortable, confronting in it a work that has achieved a degree of popularity denied to many more liberal works (47). This chapter concurs with Mazzeno’s argument moderating the stridency of many critics and scholars, some of whom have been cited here, that

Greenwald’s moral argument is no different than his brilliant performance in the court- martial. As Mazzeno contends, both arguments can be seen as exercises in intentionally upsetting the confidence of smug officers so sure that because they did the right thing in one instance, “their assessment of the navy as an organization unfit for America’s best and brightest is correct” (47). Yet this chapter also concurs with Mazzeno’s assessment that Wouk was unabashedly conservative in presenting his view of warfare, to the point of defending, on occasion, “fascist” tendencies in the American military as

“expediencies” in times of war, and attacking those “who protest them” (47). But even 164

this is debatable. There is evidence in the novel and play that the military knew it made a mistake in not relieving Queeg from duty before the trial.

In the novel, the district legal officer Captain Breakstone reviews the case file before the court-martial, thinking to himself that he “could not recall a case that had unsettled and depressed him more. The inquiry (into the cut towline incident) had been a botch. The recommendations were stupid” (348). This implies that Breakstone knows that Queeg should have been removed before the trial. Earlier in the novel, Capt. Grace meets with Queeg to investigate Keefer’s report about the cut towline and reports back to the Admiral that the facts weren’t clear, although he says he tried to get Queeg to voluntarily take a shore position. The Admiral decides to send the Caine backto the

States for an overhaul, saying “[l]et this Queeg pull his next butch somewhere else”

(173). The military high command does not want Queeg on the Caine for sound reasons, but the military is implicated in not replacing Queeg earlier.

Although the play does not directly state Blakeley’s disgust at the military’s mistake in not removing Queeg sooner, the play makes this implicit in the facts of the testimony. It is implicit in the evidence finally presented by the naval expert witness

Southard that Queeg should have listened to Maryk about heading north into the storm, as well as the degree to which Queeg comes apart on the stand. The fact that the military tribunal acquits Maryk in the play, symbolically issuing a guilty verdict to Queeg suggests that the military likely also recognizes that the problem should have been handled sooner. These facts support the idea that Wouk’s position on responsibility as 165

blind obedience is more complex than what Whyte and the Cold War scholars cited here said about it. Mazzeno’s contention also supports this view that “[w]hether Queeg is to be seen as a hero or a goat, the preponderance of evidence suggests that his relief was correct under the circumstances” (47). The fact that the play doesn’t reverse Maryk’s acquittal as does the novel, places more emphasis on the military’s earlier responsibility for Queeg’s removal.

In a notable aspect of Queeg’s gender coding in adaptation, which is obviously feminine as he deteriorates and his cowardliness and sickness are in plain view in the novel and adaptations, there is additional text in the novel as well as lines in the play that bear mentioning. The degree to which Queeg is feminized further masculinizes

Greenwald in the juxtaposition, first as his legal opponent and then as his moral defender.

The reverse is seen in Queeg’s gender coding in relation to the Caine officers who are initially masculinized and then effeminized. Queeg is typically naked in front of officers in the novel, when he calls them into his cabin for conferences, and referred to as an “old lady” by Capt. Grace (173). In the play, Queeg says during his testimony, “[tjhose two

(Stillwell and Keith) were mighty affectionate” (77). When Greenwald asks,

“[ajffectionate, sir?” Queeg responds as follows: “Well, it seems to me every time Keith thought I looked cross-eyed at Stillwell there was all kinds of screeching and hollering from Keith as though I were picking on his wife or something” (Ibid.). The suggestion of latent homosexuality from the period’s Freudian psychology resides in Queeg’s sexual projection onto the officers. Overtly, Queeg is attempting to deflect from his own 166

cowardice at the trial. However, the novel is less sanitized, supporting this possibility more fully in the description of these inappropriate conferences, particularly since

Freudian psychology is used to pathologize Queeg during the trial. The play is clearly more conservative in this example.

Hollywood withdrew movie production offers to the Navy due to the Navy’s requirement of major changes in the story and script. But after Wouk’s book won a

Pulitzer Prize and became a bestseller, the Navy softened its position because the novel’s story was already so well known, and the play’s success helped advertise the concurrent movie. The Department of Defense and the Navy approved independent producer

Stanley Kramer’s screenplay adaptation, since Hollywood had withdrawn. Columbia

Pictures bought the rights to Kramers’ film, and the Navy made significant changes despite the public’s knowledge of the novel.

The 1954 Hollywood movie dilutes the tight focus in the play by trying to follow the novel’s two plots in the pre- and post-trial exposition, watering-down the complexity of the play’s script. For example, the trial is flattened in plodding direction, except for

Bogart’s characterization as Queeg breaking down on the stand. Strong institutionally masculine images of naval bases with their backdrops of aircraft carriers, destroyers, and other combat vessels as well as naval film clips also predominate in the movie, emphasizing the power of the military over the complexity of meanings in the play. In exchange for access to this property, the movie had to make these changes in the script since the Navy exercised screenplay approval rights. Beidler persuasively contends that 167

the exchange was garnered “at the price of serious rewriting and a sanitizing of various issues of command responsibility and military law, changes that would always brand the movie — or so the story would continue to be told — as answering to military censors in ways where the book or play had had to make no such concessions” (131). However, although Beidler does not specify what is meant by the sanitization of these various issues and script changes, they are obvious.

Greenwald’s Jewishness is not mentioned at all in the movie, and his speech at the party omits references to Nazis making his mother into soap and the like. Instead, his movie speech focuses on how Queeg reached out for help, but was turned down by the officers. For example, Queeg says that the ship is like a family and that a captain sometimes needs help. He also says something to the effect of the following — if only they could find a way to help each other. This aspect of the Captain is played down in the novel and the play. But it made Queeg more sympathetic in the movie from a naval point of view. The movie also removes other ethnic and class distinctions from the novel, including the identification of May Wynn as an Italian from a working-class family, as well as Maryk’s working-class background. References to the former distinction are not in the play, but the latter is in it. Another change is that Keefer is shamed in the movie, telling Greenwald to say what he, Keefer, did to Queeg, Maryk, and

Keith; whereas in the play and novel, Keefer does not make such a concession. For example, in the play, Keefer instead tries to interrupt the speech, saying, “[n]ow wait a minute —,” and tells Greenwald that he is drunk (94). 168

In agreement with Beidler, the Navy’s involvement with the movie and the changes that ostensibly result from it make the movie more culturally and politically conservative than the novel or the play. Cold War cultural scholar Laurence H. Suid’s opinion is similar since he mostly writes about how “the military manages to improve its image in any film on which it assists,” and that “the novel and the movie remain ambiguous in their final treatment of Captain Queeg, but that both the character and the

Navy fare significantly better in the film than in the novel” (158).

Beidler also persuasively contends that the concurrent production timing of the play and the movie, with the play’s concentration on the courtroom scenes became a

“remarkably effective publicity vehicle, billing itself as a dramatic abstract or epitome of the novel’s essential conflict, while also heralding the imminence of a big-screen

Hollywood treatment sure to recapture the narrative scope of the original print saga”

(129). Beidler’s convincing conclusion about the commercial relationship between the novel, play, and movie is that The Caine Mutiny adaptation process epitomizes the exploitative “big-war, big-book, big- movie production formula of the commercial icon of American remembering” about the “Good War,” also exemplified by South Pacific and Mister Roberts (129, 2).

In contrast to the Hollywood movie, the 1988 Robert Altman filmic adaptation largely retains fidelity to the play’s script, including Greenwald’s Jewishness and

Keefer’s push-back after Greenwald’s moral pummeling. Most strikingly, the Altman film intensifies the paradoxical aspects of the play. It more sharply depicts Greenwald’s 169

complicated gender coding through his isolation in the party scene compared to the

Hollywood movie. Altman’s interpretation of the play’s script in his film suggests more depth to Greenwald’s conflict over the divide between conformity and individuality related to his gender and ethnic identities, in comparison to the flatter conservativism suggested by the Hollywood movie. Greenwald’s complex relationship to the combination of his Jewishness, his military role, and his masculine identities suggests increased hyper-masculinity or conflict and guilt about surviving the Holocaust as well as the acquittal of Maryk. As such, Altman’s film seems to tilt towards liberal questions about the limits of military authority in a democracy more clearly than the novel and the

1954 movie.

In the Altman film, the banquet room is filled with many people and a lot of activity, including piano playing, singing, drinking, walking around, and smoking. Most people at the party seem not to hear Greenwald’s remarks except for Keefer and Maryk.

Greenwald follows Keefer around the room, as Greenwald talks while Keefer tries to get away from him, apparently in blase disdain for Greenwald’s drunkenness as well as his words. Maryk follows Greenwald, trying to get him to let it go. After Greenwald throws his yellow wine in Keefer’s face, Greenwald is already staggering out of the large room and out of range of Keefer when he says, “You can wipe for the rest of your life, mister.

You’ll never wipe off that yellow stain... See you in Tokyo, you mutineer” (95). In

Altman’s interpretation of this scene, Maryk hears this, closes the door, smiles as he pauses and grabs his date to join the party. The camera moves to Keefer who is talking 170

with other people on the other side of the room as if nothing happened. The cake is cut and the party continues.

In the novel, after Greenwald stumbles away, food is finished quickly in the awkward silence, after which everyone leaves. In the 1954 movie, the smaller group of officers is shamed into silence by Greenwald’s speech, and Keefer is left standing alone after the toast, supposedly with wine dripping from his face. Altman’s approach suggests post-Vietnam era changes projected onto the 1950s. In the Altman scene, the fact that the party goes on after Greenwald’s rebuke implies that there may be no or little Caine officer shame about the acquittal. Instead, Greenwald seems to be isolated by his hyper­ masculine guilt about Queeg or his need as a Jew to moralize about upholding the traditional military authority that destroys Nazism. Greenwald is ostracized by the officers, ironically becoming the lone individual against the group in an ending that suggests a liberal critique in Greenwald’s misplaced moral verdict.

In contrast to Altman’s production, the 2006 Broadway revival sounds problematic as a dry version according to the reviews, other than Ivanek’s performance as Queeg. It is difficult to ascertain whether this production brought out the debate about the play’s reflection of the paradox of the fifties, and its ultimately conservative message through gender coding based on the reviews alone. But the choice of The Caine Mutiny Court-

Martial for a Broadway revival signals an ongoing discourse with the themes of the play, including the paradoxes of the fifties now more visible in the distance from that decade. 171

IV. Conclusions

The decision to revive The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial on Broadway in 2006, which was in the midst of the war in Iraq, was predicated on its contemporary relevance according to its director Jerry Zak. But its short run signals that it didn’t sufficiently resonate, which might be related to directorial weaknesses as suggested in the mixed reviews or to other specific characteristics of the production. Its lack of a long successful run, however, doesn’t mean the play’s critique of military command and its implications relative to the tensions of the fifties and to democracy are no longer relevant. However, it may mean that how it achieves its meanings is less appealing to a contemporary audience for other reasons. These might include wide exposure to the contemporary courtroom genre through movies and television, along with other aspects of the play’s style, pacing, and other characteristics that may no longer work, some of which were suggested in the reviews.

Regardless of the less appealing aspects of the play for today’s audience, the paradox of hyper-masculinity and its signification of 1950s tension between individuality as masculinity and conformity as femininity remain evident. Greenwald’s guilt-ridden moral reprimand reveals his inability to reconcile the masculine individualist values inherent in his victory in Maryk’s defense with his feminine conforming values of traditional military culture, which in his view necessitates supporting authority to overcome tyranny. For Greenwald, the dilemma seems to threaten the very democracy that he holds dear as an American and as a Jew. But the play provides evidence that 172

supports Queeg’s removal, which further implicates the military for not removing him sooner.

The paradoxes in Wouk’s play change meaning based on how it is directed.

While it is a film, Altman shows how the play might be directed to amplify the debate by increasing Greenwald’s contradictory identities related to his hyper-masculine gender coding. Altman positions Greenwald to be ostracized by the Caine officers instead of eliciting their defensiveness and shame. Such positioning seems to be a more liberal critique of upholding military conformity.

In conclusion, The Caine Mutiny adaptation process reveals that the different versions of Wouk’s narrative are not simply about unquestioned adherence to authority.

Instead, the process reveals different degrees of complexity within each form and between them through the cultural lens of gender. The novel and the Hollywood movie based on it, instead lean towards increased conservativism and the endorsement of the support of weak authority for the greater good. The play and Altman’s film based on it bring out the paradoxes of the 1950s postwar and Cold War cultures more clearly by their tight focus on the Greenwald’s hyper-masculine conflict in the courtroom drama and the party afterwards, with Altman’s interpretation tilting the most towards liberalism. The overall legacy of meaning related to postwar victory and Cold War culture in The Caine

Mutiny adaptation process is revealed through complicated gender dualities and political polarities that change between forms. The axes of masculine and conservative are joined and opposed to the feminine and liberal, representing the complex paradox of the tension in the 1950s between liberalism’s promise of individual freedom and conservativism’s constraining authority. 174

Conclusions

All three 1950s plays have been shown as illuminating the liberal and conservative paradox related to the fifties’ cultures of victory and the Cold War through their respective lenses of race in South Pacific and gender in Mister Roberts and The

Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. All three adaptation processes have been demonstrated as revealing mostly increasing conservativism as each novel travels respectively to its stage and screen adaptations in their midcentury contexts.

In South Pacific, the fifties’ paradox is essentially represented by the juxtaposition of Nellie and Joe, along with other representations. Nellie transforms her prejudice by wanting to marry Emile and to adopt his two mixed-race children, representing freedom through liberal individuality. But conservative conformity coexists when Joe, the miscegenator, gets killed off. In Mister Roberts, Roberts’s hyper­ masculine drive for individuality is aborted too late, but not before he realizes that the masculine freedom he seeks can be found in conservative and feminizing conformity, while also advocating against petty tyrannies from within. Likewise, in The Caine

Mutiny Court-Martial, Greenwald’s hyper-masculine drive represented by his passionate defense of the individual and the underdog backfires in his confounding guilt over the necessity of conformity to win the war, reflecting feminizing conservative forces. In both warship plays, this becomes the democratized masculinity of the “Ordinary Man-as- hero,” although this is more apparent in Mister Roberts's idealized fraternity.

As the warship dramas show, the traditional axes of gender and political polarities 175

join and become opposed as the masculine becomes bound with conservative forces and conversely, the feminine becomes tied to liberal drives. However, the juxtaposition of

Nellie and Joe does not show the same rupture of the traditional axes. Nellie’s triumphant transformation, “Our Heroine,” as in the title of Michener’s story about her, is represented as the final image in the original musical. Although Nellie’s conformity is present because Emile’s children are not biologically her own, her intended adoption of them remains liberal, particularly for the era of Cold War containment. South Pacific has been successfully revived at the Broadway level, and it is also vastly popular at other levels with its ongoing annual average rate of 450 productions worldwide. The fact that it is a musical, and its music and lyrics are beloved, accounts for a great deal, if not most of its ongoing success, in addition to its content and themes. Nevertheless, its success must also raise questions about aspects of South Pacific compared to Mister Roberts and

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial that make the musical’s themes still relevant in revival.

Likewise, it raises the question about why the warship dramas were not as widely revived.

The idea that perhaps we’ve absorbed and moved beyond the paradoxes represented in the warship dramas is likely or we’d see more of these plays, although the more complex critique of the Wouk play, in particular, still seems relevant. While political contradictions still exist in the military, in gender politics, and between the right and the left today, we live in a very different moment compared to the postwar culture of triumphalism and midcentury Cold War culture. Our current paradoxes and 176

complications seem to be more relevant in other plays that succeed in capturing today’s complexities. Aside from the iconic songs and music, the reason for the difference between the longevity of South Pacific compared to the warship dramas seems to lie elsewhere than in their paradoxes.

The suggestion is that the resolution or overt message of South Pacific is more clearly liberal than in the warship dramas. South P acific central romantic couple is

Nellie and Emile, with Joe and Liat as the secondary romance, since Joe ends up as a tragic hero and Nellie’s positive resolution ends the play. The “feel-good” family story and interracial adoption as the promise of broader racial justice in the American community framing the original Broadway production likely explains part of its wide ongoing appeal, in addition to its prized music. Even if the “feel-good” interracial family story might be secondary to the brilliant music and songs, it is still important in the musical’s ongoing success. Additionally, the timeliness of South Pacific endured beyond the fifties into the sixties as the civil rights movement was fully underway. The subsequent decades have shown that civil rights may be law, but racial justice is not yet realized. Because American culture is hardly rid of racism, despite the optimistic fact of our first African American president, South Pacific may also continue to speak to the hope for equality inherent in the changing color of America.

Mister Roberts and The Caine Mutiny , on the other hand, may be less appealing as revival choices because they no longer speak to an America that is changing color and a nation that is also is embroiled in wars today that young people are 177

not dying to get into, unlike the character of Roberts. The warship dramas may speak more to conservative white masculinity through their military stories compared to South

Pacific, despite their representations of the paradox of liberal and conservative drives.

Wouk’s play may have more traction as a revival choice because it does not sentimentalize military fraternity to the degree of Mister Roberts, explaining its recent

Broadway revival. Idealized white military fraternalism along with sanitized militarism was also dashed starting with Yietnam-era movies.

Mister Roberts also represents stereotypes of the ideal beloved military leader in

Roberts and the stupid, bad leader in the Captain, simplicities that give a false impression of the complexity of the paradox that exists in the play. Nonetheless, this perception may be a factor in Heggen and Logan’s play’s lack of revival compared to Wouk’s play. The individual characters also seem more complex in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial compared to Mister Roberts, partly due to Mister Roberts's style of farce, which may also help explain why the Wouk play, instead, was revived on Broadway. Even so, Wouk’s play was not a very successful revival for unclear reasons, although the reviews seem to suggest it was related to the specific characteristics of the production. The reviews point to the possibilities of the revival’s supposed flattening of the drama and its formulaic nature in comparison to courtroom dramas on television and in the movies since that are more dynamic.

Altman’s 1988 filmic adaptation of the play, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, movie is not widely known. Altman’s trademark active camera movement and 178

sometimes difficult to discern over-lapping but realistic speech in the background may thwart wider appreciation of this adaptation, given the comment in one of the reviews cited earlier, although this spectator thinks these characteristics enliven it. But Altman’s film shows how ideology changes with artistic choices in its more liberal conclusion that more deeply amplifies the fifties’ paradox.

In application of Lionel Trilling’s critique of midfifties’ liberalism to the warship dramas and their representations of paradox, both plays foreclose a conception of masculine heroism as genuinely democratic. This foreclosure signals further debate since paradox logically represents both aspects of contradiction. The warship plays preclude a de-gendered liberalism in which the traditionally feminine attributes of collectivity and support do not threaten masculinity as undemocratic, but instead make democracy more equal and free. This suggests a social(ist) liberalism or communitarianism3.

Trilling’s critique of midcentury liberalism and Freud’s importance to the meaning of literature also include the idea that there is also no easy framework, binary, or hierarchy within which to analyze literature and culture from a rigorously liberal viewpoint. Trilling warned midcentury liberals that they should have been more rigorously critical of their own positions in order to defend and develop liberalism.

Presumably, this would have included rigor in liberally critiquing conservative literature in the way that Trilling’s critique was stimulated by the dogmatic liberal defense of the

3 Communitarianism challenges “liberalism’s” devaluing of the interests of the community, particularly in the context of the idea that the habits and traditions of actual people living in specific times and places are not fixed. 179

Soviet Union. Yet liberal scholars cited in these chapters often seem to diminish Wouk’s and Heggen and Logan’s works as dogmatically conservative. As Cold War scholar

Stephen Whitfield’s conclusions about The Caine Mutiny and Mister Roberts exemplify, he said that as Cold War cultural products, these works affirm American ideology and a way of life in opposition to communism. “Americanism” is represented [in these works] as the “traditional commitment to competitive individualism in social life, to the liberal stress on rights in political life, and to private enterprise in economic life” (Whitfield 53).

While this is true on one level, it doesn’t address the essential contradiction or paradox in these plays.

Scholars who seem to think that the two novels and their plays open up both sides of the polarization of liberalism and conservativism to debate about rights, individual and collective, seem to be in the minority. Both plays argue for the rights of the community, in this case, of military community, to win the war against tyranny. But they do not remove the idea of the necessary balance in the rights of the individual in exposing the tyranny of such captains. Wouk’s play deals with this more directly, which might suggest Wouk’s interest in exploring the subject more deeply than it was explored in

Mister Roberts, since Wouk wrote The Caine Mutiny after Heggen wrote his novel. By logical extension, although not concretely evident in the two plays, this argument could be leveraged in favor of social and other collective programs in the name of democracy or greater freedom and equality to fight internal forms of tyranny related to poverty and other problems. 180

A specific example of the application of Trilling’s ideas relate to how the collision between Roberts’s hyper-masculinity and patriotism make him a tragic product of the Cold War era and the culture of victory, and Pulver, his ideological, although not tragic, “son.” Although the ongoing check and balance on conformity seems to be present in Pulver’s assumption of Roberts’s role relative to the Captain’s power at the play’s close, it precludes genuinely democratic action as a more effective response to the tension between conformity and individuality. Instead, Mister Roberts only allows a limited choice for traditional masculinity as represented by Roberts’s letter revealing his epiphany, which is to shore up weak authority for the greater good, while doing what one individual can in advocating against authority from within.

Pulver carries on the advocacy from within after Roberts is gone. In this sense,

Pulver, like Roberts, represents individuality as a check and balance to conformity. But

Pulver’s assumption of Roberts’s battle against the Captain’s oppression will not ultimately work, like Roberts’s before him did not, since Pulver will not succeed alone.

This implies the empowerment of organizing as a community or group without the threat that doing so jeopardizes traditional individualist manhood, democracy, and the

American way of life, even within this type of a noncombat military environment.

During the Cold War, such stances made liberals vulnerable to the hysteria of McCarthy and the associated legislative committees. Today, without exploring the range of the implications of paradox in these plays, they seem conservative and ideologically flattened. 181

In aggregate, the inquiry into issues of the representation of postwar identity in these adaptation processes shows a conservative pathway as ideas travel from the novel to the stage and then to the screen. Shifts in values are associated with the exigencies of changing artistic forms in the adaptation process, along with the enormous financial rewards the postwar boom made possible on Broadway and in Hollywood. The postwar culture of triumphalism and the threat posed by the Cold War combined to drive tensions in the three plays. The tensions reflect the paradox of the 1950s as a set of contradictions between liberal and conservative forces evident through the lenses of race and gender.

Just as gender is complex, shifting within and between individuals, and the path to racial justice is complicated by the threat of lost white power, so is the tension between conformity and individuality within democracy. Seeing these contradictory forces through such lenses provides a relevant window into the plays and the 1950s as the legacy of these adaptation processes. 182

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