89. Mutiny On The Bounty (1935)

Directed By Frank Lloyd

Synopsis

Come on, you know it... Bad Captain leads men to mutiny and asylum in Tahiti, they are then forced to escape to the Pitcairn islands.

Review

This film got the Oscar for best movie of 1935 and surely if it isn't the best film it is right up there. I am actually not a person who usually enjoys sea-faring stories. I hated Master and Commander for example, found it dull to the point of desperation. But this is a different story.

The reason why I loved this film although I am not usually a fan of sea movies is because, like I tell my friends who hate Sci-Fi, when any story is centred on interesting characters, with interesting relationships, set against an exciting story the background is pretty much irrelevant.

This film does that, there are three main characters here and all are played superbly by Clark Gable, Charles Laughton and Franchot Tone, who were all nominated for best actor. Three actors on the best actor nominations is a one time event, that never was repeated and they deserved it. The film grips you from the beggining and for the more than 2 hours that it lasts it never lets go. And it is excellently filmed from the beggining to the end. Pretty much a perfect film. Get it at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The movie does contain a few historical inaccuracies. Captain Bligh was never on board HMS Pandora, nor was he present at the trial of the mutineers who stayed on Tahiti. At the time he was halfway around the world on a second voyage for breadfruit plants. Fletcher Christian's father had died many years before Christian's travels on board the Bounty - the movie shows the elder Christian at the trial. It should be noted though, that the movie was always presented as an adaptation of the Nordhoff and Hall trilogy, which already differed from the actual story of the mutiny.

Bligh is depicted as a brutal, sadistic disciplinarian. Particular episodes include a keel hauling and flogging a dead man. Neither of these happened. Keel hauling was used rarely if at all and had been abandoned long before Bligh's time. Indeed the meticulous record of the Bounty's log reveals that the flogging rate was lower than the average for that time.

However, some historically accurate aspects exist in the film. Clark Gable had to shave off his famous moustache because the sailors in the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century had to be clean-shaven. Gable was reluctant to shave it off, though.

In the final scene of the film Gable gives a rousing speech to his fellow mutineers speaking of creating a perfect society of free men on Pitcairn away from Bligh and the Navy. The reality was very different. Free from the restraints of Naval discipline the mutineers proved incapable of self government. Pitcairn degenerated into a true hell on earth of drunkenness, rape and ultimately murder. Apart from John Adams all the mutineers perished, most of them by violence. Whether the film intended the irony will never be known.

And if you wonder what Fletcher Christian's descendants are up to today... go here

The Simpson's version of Mutiny On The Bounty