a rack of Lee-Enfield rifles. Poitier and Balsam's initial flypast and landing from a Whirlwind helicopter were filmed aboard another Type 15 frigate, , whose pennant number of "F159" is clearly visible in the scene. The vessel portraying a Soviet intelligence ship has the name "Novo Sibursk", written on the hull at the bow in the Latin alphabet (rather than the Russian language's Cyrillic alphabet), though "Novosibirsk" would have been a more accurate rendering. Reception Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that "the whole thing transcends plausibility [...] because of its gross exaggeration of a highly improbable episode. [...] the blame for this climactic blooper must be lodged against James Poe, who wrote the script from a novel by Mark Rascovich." Analysis The American historian Stephen J. Whitfield argued that The Bedford Incident was a rejoinder to The Caine Mutiny. In the 1954 film The Caine Mutiny, and even more so in the 1951 novel that it was adapted from, the incompetent, deranged Captain Philip Queeg, whose actions provoked the eponymous mutiny, is ultimately portrayed as a victim of the snide, scheming intellectual Thomas Keefer, whose ethos is fundamentally opposed to that of the U.S Navy. The message of both versions of The Caine Mutiny was, as Whitfield put it, "that losing a ship in a typhoon is better than challenging a skipper whose powers of command have failed". Whitfield argued that popular mentalities had changed so much by the 1960s that more anti-militaristic films, such as The Bedford Incident, were being released. Very much like Captain Queeg of the fictional destroyer USS Caine, Finlander is a career Navy officer in command of a destroyer, who has "lost touch with reality, largely because of the constant frustration and remorseless pressure of command". In contrast to The Caine Mutiny, which "attempted to vindicate the necessity of obedience—even when that leadership is mentally unbalanced—The Bedford Incident, made without Navy co-operation, warns that such deranged authority could unleash nuclear war, which happens accidentally". Keefer, the resident intellectual aboard the Caine, starts out as the likeable voice of reason against the paranoid Captain Queeg, but is gradually revealed to be the most loathsome character in the story, being a cowardly, dishonest, and selfish schemer who is admonished for his treatment of Queeg, who is praised as an honorable, but misunderstood, career Navy officer who was only patriotically serving his country. It is