‘The Caine Mutiny’ Soundtrack

This record is a bit different than the rest on our list. In 1953, Columbia Pictures released a film adaption of Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize-winning WWII novel The Caine Mutiny. In conjunction with the film, the studio planned to release a soundtrack album, with Max Steiner’s score and bits of dialogue on one side, and the full audio of the film’s climactic court martial scene on the other. However Wouk, worried that the release would dame the financial prospects of a Broadway play he’d written based on the court martial scene, threatened to never work with the studio again if they released the album. Columbia promptly destroyed nearly all of the original copies, though about 12 managed to slip out into the world. These days, one of these copies can fetch well over $6,000. The soundtrack was officially released years later.