Each novel was like a well-crafted joke, they slapped the reader upside the head with a stunning reversal. In Huckleberry Finn we have the pivotal scene after the fog when Huck decides that he will commit the mortal sin of siding with a runaway slave rather than turn him in. This is contrary to Huck's upbringing which Mark Twain had artfully described in scene after scene leading up to that point. The pivotal scene represented a crashing down of the whole culture which supported slavery.
The Caine Mutiny worked a similar reversal. We all saw the pettiness of Capt. Queeg, his helplessness as a leader, and, finally, his flat out cowardice at the pivotal moment when the ship was about the founder in the typhoon. All of this is dramatically reversed not in the trial but in the posttrial party in which Jewish attorney Barney Greenwald (brilliantly played by José Ferrar) puts the blame squarely on the true culprit, the effete, elite, dilettante novelist, the officer-instigator of the mutiny but the moral coward who kept his hands clean.
The reversal suggests that, despite every scene in the film tending to tell us that military discipline is nothing but chicken shit, in time of war everything that effete elitists despise about the military is absolutely necessary for the survival of the nation. In this case the survival of the country, the winning of the war, is absolutely identified with the genocide against Jews. All of this is encapsulated in one sentence uttered by Barney Greenwald, half drunk but sober enough to tell the truth, "“You don’t work with a man because of the way he combs his hair. You work with him because he’s got the job or you’re no good!” (Accurate Quotation generously supplied to me by Chengdu54).
Both novels turn the world upside down in a stunning reversal and that is why they are both classics.
