starring Charles Laughton, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone
directed by Frank Lloyd
The HMS Bounty, under the command of Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton), departs Portsmouth in England and heads to Tahiti in the Pacific Ocean. Captain Bligh, unlike First Mate Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable), believes in punishing his men severely for infractions great and small.
The Bounty arrives in Tahiti intact and spends a few months there gathering breadfruit plants which are to be delivered to plantations in the West Indies. Bligh pushes Mr. Christian too far. Christian leads most of the men on board the Bounty in a mutiny. Bligh and most of the men loyal to him are set adrift in a small boat.
Christian has the Bounty head back to Tahiti where they stay for a couple of years. Bligh and the men with him manage to travel thousands of miles and eventually make it safely back to England. Bligh commands another ship in search of Christian and the other mutineers.
Bligh makes his way back to Tahiti where he finds some of the mutineers. Several others who did not mutiny, most notably Roger Byam (Franchot Tone), but were left behind on the Bounty due to a lack of space on the small boat in which Bligh and the others were set adrift. Bligh considers them all guilty. He returns to Portsmouth after wrecking the second ship on a reef. He never finds Fletcher Christian who along with most of the other mutineers departed Tahiti just before Bligh arrived and eventually settled on Pitcairn Island.
Thoughts
I've seen this movie before but it has probably been more than 45 years since I last saw it. I remembered a few scenes, mostly ones that involved the cruelty of Captain Bligh.
It is a bot unclear what happens to all the mutineers who were court martialed as the end of the movie. Byam gets sentenced to death but later pardoned. The fate of the others who were court martialed was unclear to me.
I learned a little bit about the making of this movie from a short documentary that I found online. See below for details.
I think this film is a little longer than it needs to be. It dragged a little bit. I didn't find the characters to be terribly compelling. There were some good moments but most of the characters were fairly one note. A lot of effort went into making this movie but on the whole I'm not sure it really stood the test of time in my eyes.
Notes
This film bas based the first two of a trilogy of novels, the first of which has the same name as the movie. The novels in turn were based on real events. There are some discrepancies between the movie and what actually happened.
This film received eight Academy Award nominations in six categories including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor nominations for all three leading actors. There was no Best Supporting Actor category at the time. That category was added the following year. The movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture but none of the others.
This is at least the third movie in which I have seen Clark Gable. I saw him very recently in Wife vs. Secretary (1936). I saw Charles Laughton most recently in The Big Clock (1948). I've also seen Franchot Tone in Phantom Lady (1944).
This is the only movie I have seen that was directed Frank Lloyd.
Pitcairn Island Today (1935)
9 minutes, 36 seconds
This short was included on the DVD that I borrowed from the library. It gives a brief, and most likely far from complete, picture of what life on Pitcairn Island was like in the mid-1930s.
The Making of Mutiny of the Bounty (2010)
14 minutes, 36 seconds
I found this brief documentary on YouTube. I cannot find any record of it on IMDb or Letterboxd. It was made by Frank Lloyd Films and can also be found at that organization's web site.
It pulls together some interesting facts about the making of the movie, especially about how much of the film was shot aboard the ship. There were three different ships that doubled for the original. There was some filming done in Tahiti but the movie's stars did not travel to Tahiti. Worth a look if you are interested in learning more about how the movie was made.
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