Satire/comedy has to be grounded to really make impact

I just saw this movie after decades of hearing about how much of a classic it was.

I didn't find it to be that good for this simple reason: it's not grounded and violates its internal logic.

Case in point, Cagney's character is depicted as such a crazy loon that he's refused to grant liberty for over a year. But the thing is, a maniac is still a human being, and a maniac--as much as he'd enjoy riding the crew--would also not mind taking a break himself. Even Hitler and Mussolini had their soirees and mini-vacations during the war because a tyrant needs to decompress at some point before cracking the whip; otherwise, he'd wind up just as frazzled as his underlings.

A more grounded--and better scenario--would've been the CO being a hypocritical douchebag in having wanted liberty himself, but then pretending to Mister Roberts that he was dead set against it unless he had his complete and total obedience. That would've made the blackmail all the more infuriating, because we'd be seeing Mister Roberts being tricked into exchanging his free spiritedness for something that the CO had been planning to do anyway.

Another example of how little grounded the movie has is how crazy the crew gets when they go on liberty. Beating up women, tearing off their clothes, running bikes off piers, destroying an official's home, etc. I guess the point was to point out that the men had been cooped up for so long that they went "crazy." But c'mon. They didn't act wild; they acted like sociopaths.

An example of how the movie violates its own logic: Mister Roberts is a free spirit, yes, but he comes across as completely disciplined and having restraint. So, when he starts doing the "yes, sir" routine to the CO after the crew comes back from liberty, why on earth would the crew not have imagined that part of the reason why he does that is how poorly they behaved?

To put it another way, yes, the CO implies that Roberts acted like a poodle because he wanted a promotion. But the crew had violated every single rule of conduct when on liberty and was even chewed out by high ranking officials from the base/another ship (can't remember), who undoubtedly were going to report the CO and the crew to upper command.

Why couldn't they have assumed that Roberts acted the way he did because he was disappointed in how they behaved? Also, on what planet would normal people--who'd fucked up that badly--not also wonder if Roberts hadn't had his balls handed to him by the CO because of their conduct? The way they reacted, they acted as if they could've gone back to business as usual the next day after making a complete and total disgrace of themselves on shore and potentially getting the CO, officers and everyone else on the ship in deep shit with upper command. (They beat up and may have sexually assaulted women, for God's sake! They vandalized property, too!)

Again, a more grounded scenario would've been the crew imagining that Roberts was cowed because of them and feeling guilty and ashamed as a result. They mistakenly think that Roberts no longer loves them as a father figure (because he was disappointed in them) and then later learn that it was all a misunderstanding. This would've made his final letter all the more poignant. After all the b.s. they had put him through, they learn without a shadow of a doubt that he never stopped loving them. And then, BOOM, it turns out he died.

Last example of how little this movie is grounded: why would the official had written that Roberts had died drinking coffee? When people die tragically, no one cares what they were doing enough in their last moments to point it out to others. If someone you knew died in a car accident or something, no one would write, "She died while she was drinking the coffee she had just bought at Dunkin Donuts." They'd just say, "She was on her to work when a drunk driver slammed into the passenger side."