 His most notable box-office success as a director came in 1954, with "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial", a full-length stage dramatisation by Herman Wouk of the court-martial scene in Wouk's novel "The Caine Mutiny".The play, starring Henry Fonda as defence attorney Barney Greenwald, opened the same year as the film starring Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg and José Ferrer as Greenwald based on the original novel, but did not affect that film's box-office performance.Laughton also directed a staged reading in 1953 of Stephen Vincent Benét's "John Brown's Body", a full-length poem about the American Civil War and its aftermath.