Billy Budd

I went to college so long ago I can't remember whether I read Billy Budd. I know I took a course in Melville, well, it was "Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James," taught by one of my favorite professors, Paul Dolan, but I don't remember if we read Billy Budd. I'm glad I don't remember it, because as I watched the film version, made in 1962, I was riveted with suspense.

Based on a play that was in turn based on Herman Melville's posthumously published novel, Billy Budd is an allegory of good and evil set at sea. The setting is a British ship, "The Avenger," during the war between Britain and France in 1797. Budd is a merchant seaman about a ship ironically called "The Rights of Man," but is impressed into service aboard the naval vessel. He was treated well aboard the merchant ship, but discovers a different world on the naval ship.

The captain and officers are fair men (Captain Vere is played by Peter Ustinov, who also directed). But the master-at-arms, who is responsible for discipline, is the epitome of evil. John Claggart, sinisterly played by Robert Ryan, is a bitter man who is too full of pride in himself as dispenser of cruelty to be sufficiently human. The men fear him, and he feeds off this. He punishes capriciously, and takes perverse delight as men are flogged. He doesn't know quite to make of Billy, though. As played by Terence Stamp (his first film role), Billy is angelic, ignorant but innocent, eager only to see the good in men. He honestly doesn't hate Claggart, even after the man causes the death of one of his friends by making up go up into the mast despite being ill. When Billy tries to befriend Claggart, it only makes the master-at-arms hate Billy the more.

Claggart eventually accuses Billy of mutiny, and I'll stop there because the rest of the film had me on tenterhooks. Ustinov and his officers (one of them John Neville, the eventually portrayer of Baron Munchhausen, another a young David McCallum) debate the rule of law against the rules of conscience. It's a long, talky scene, easily evident of a stage adaptation, but the writing and acting are so good it doesn't matter.

Stamp was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Ryan is chilling in his evil, while Ustinov is also brilliant, particularly his reaction to one of the last lines of the film, "God bless Captain Vere!" The ending reduces all to the folly of war, the cruelty of blind justice, and the death of innocence. A very good film.