As a trial attorney, I have always loved the Greenwald speech at the end of this movie. I have wanted to say things like that to people. You also have to love a movie where the real villian is not known until the end and it turns out to be Fred McMurray.
shareI saw what he was doing on the Kearsage. I think the reason it took so long was because it WAS Fred MacMurray and mostly I know him from television and Disney movies.
Fred MacMurray was actually incredibly versatile and he was a total rat in Double Indemnity and Pushover, but yeah, it is a shock to see him play a bad guy. I felt he was a bad guy from his first scene, though, where he's denigrating the Navy. I just knew then if there was trouble, he'd be at the bottom of it. And I did love Barney's speech-so true. It was even better in the book, where he talks about how he dropped everything to learn to fight so he could save his mother from being turned into soap by Hitler, and it takes time to learn how to fight. Barney said Queeg and all the people like him, who already knew how to fight, were the ones who bought Barney and everybody like him that time, and he was grateful to Queeg because Queeg saved his mother from being used to wash a Nazi's behind. It was very powerful.
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