Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

Official trailer

A Beautiful, Bloated Epic

Mutiny on the Bounty is a beautiful, bloated film, and the story of how it got made is more gripping than the one on screen. It was meant to be MGM’s great prestige picture of 1962, a three-hour widescreen epic with the biggest star in the world, filmed on location in the South Seas. It ended up running wildly over budget, losing a fortune and damaging the studio for years, and the fighting behind the camera shows on screen in almost every scene of the second half.

Lewis Milestone directed it, after Carol Reed, the original director, left the production.

It’s a remake of the 1935 film with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, a best picture winner, and it was nominated for best picture itself. I give it a 6. It has great things in it, a superb Bligh, beautiful photography and a tense first hour, and it has a Fletcher Christian I’ve never been able to take entirely seriously.

I come away from this film half charmed and half worn out. The first hour on the water has me leaning forward, Howard’s Bligh has me hooked, and then Tahiti lulls me into watching the clock. Brando’s accent makes me smile in places where I don’t think I’m meant to.

The Voyage Out

The story is history, loosely told. In 1787 the Royal Navy sends the Bounty to Tahiti to collect breadfruit plants for the West Indies, as cheap food for slaves on the sugar plantations.

Captain William Bligh is in command. Fletcher Christian, a gentleman officer from a good family, is his first lieutenant, and the two men dislike each other from the first day.

Bligh drives the crew hard. He cuts rations to save money, flogs men for small offenses, and tries to round Cape Horn against the weather to save time, battering the ship and the men for weeks before he finally gives up and turns east. It’s the best stretch of the film, because the tension between captain and first officer builds slowly and the sea is frightening. Milestone had directed All Quiet on the Western Front, and he’s very good at men under pressure in confined spaces.

The Cape Horn sequence in particular is terrific: huge seas, a ship straining under impossible weather and a captain who refuses to turn back. The film is at its most gripping here, and it makes you understand why the crew’s resentment grew.

Trevor Howard’s Bligh

Trevor Howard is the best thing in the film, and I’d argue he’s the real lead. He plays Bligh as a professional sailor from a humble background who has clawed his way up through the navy and resents the gentleman officers who were born to command, Christian above all. His cruelty comes from insecurity. He’s terrified the voyage will fail, and his career with it, so he tightens every screw a little further.

In one scene he punishes a man for the theft of some cheese that was his own doing, and you can see him know it and refuse to back down, because backing down in front of the crew would be worse than injustice. This Bligh is far more interesting than Laughton’s gleeful monster in 1935, and far more believable. Howard never asks for sympathy, and he gets some anyway.

Howard makes the case that Bligh was a good sailor and a poor leader, a man who knew everything about ships and nothing about the men who sailed them. That’s a far more modern reading of the character, and historians have tended to back it since.

Brando’s Christian

Marlon Brando plays Christian as a dandy, with a plummy English accent, elaborate manners and an air of boredom with the navy, the voyage and Bligh. He wears silk, he drawls, and for the first hour it’s hard to know what to make of him. Some viewers find it a sharp satire of the English upper class. Many more find it simply mannered, and it was mocked at the time.

Once the ship reaches Tahiti and the mutiny builds, he finds something real. The moment Christian finally loses his temper, after watching Bligh treat a dying crewman with contempt, is a fine piece of acting: a man who has spent the whole voyage insulated by manners suddenly out of patience. And the late scenes, where Christian realizes what he’s done and what it will cost everyone who followed him, are Brando’s best in the film. It’s a strange, uneven performance from the greatest actor of his generation, and it’s impossible to ignore.

Whatever you think of the accent, the performance has a clear idea behind it: a man who uses manners as armor, who’s been trained all his life never to show that anything matters, and who finally cracks. The idea is better than the execution, but it’s there.

Tahiti

Once the Bounty reaches Tahiti, the film slows to a crawl, and knowingly. The crew fall in love with the island and its people, and after months of Bligh’s discipline, who could blame them? The sequences of dancing, fishing, swimming and feasting are lovely, shot in real color on real beaches in the enormous Ultra Panavision frame, and they’re some of the most beautiful footage MGM ever produced.

Christian falls for Maimiti, the daughter of the island’s chief, played by Tarita Teriipaia.

She wasn’t a professional actor and she has very few lines, but she has a directness that cuts through Brando’s mannerisms in their scenes together. She and Brando later married, and he eventually bought an atoll near Tahiti, Tetiaroa, where he lived for long stretches of his life. The film changed his life more than it changed cinema.

These sequences are also where the film’s pacing collapses, and they lose me. The footage is gorgeous and I’d still have cut half of it. It takes a very long time to get back on the water, and the mutiny, when it comes, has to fight an hour of holiday footage for momentum.

The Mutiny

The mutiny comes on the voyage home, when Bligh’s treatment of the crew, and of one dying man in particular, finally breaks Christian. It’s staged as an explosion of temper.

Christian strikes Bligh, the crew take the ship, and within minutes it’s done. Bligh and the men loyal to him are set adrift in the ship’s open launch, with a few supplies, thousands of miles from any friendly port.

The film cuts away from them almost at once. That’s a pity. The real Bligh sailed that tiny overloaded boat more than three thousand miles to Timor, with barely any food or water, and lost only one man to the voyage. It’s one of the great feats of navigation in history, and it’s the one part of the story that makes Bligh a hero. The 1962 film has no room for it, and its portrait of Bligh is poorer for leaving it out.

That omission is the film’s worst decision. Bligh’s voyage is the most dramatic episode in the real story, and a three-hour picture treats it as an afterthought because the star is on the other boat. I’d happily trade twenty minutes of Tahitian dancing for twenty minutes of Howard in that open launch.

Pitcairn

Christian and his mutineers, with a group of Tahitian men and women, sail away to find an island the navy will never search. They settle on Pitcairn, a tiny, remote speck in the Pacific, and burn the Bounty so they can never be found or tempted to leave.

Christian suffers bad burns trying to save the ship, and he dies delivering a long final speech. It’s the most theatrical scene in the picture, and people either love it or laugh at it.

Historically, what happened on Pitcairn was far grimmer. Within a few years most of the mutineers had killed each other, been killed or died of drink and violence, and the details of Christian’s own death are still disputed.

The real settlement descended into drink, jealousy and murder, and when an American ship found the island in 1808, only one of the mutineers was still alive. Christian’s own fate is still uncertain. The film’s tidy, noble death has nothing to do with any of it.

I’m in the laughing camp. Brando’s long death speech is where the film’s grandeur tips into something I can’t take seriously, and after three hours I want a harder ending than a noble farewell.

Brando and Harris

Richard Harris plays John Mills, a sailor who hates Bligh and pushes hardest for the mutiny, and he and Brando reportedly loathed each other.

Harris was a young, fierce actor on the way up, and Brando was the most famous star in the world, used to getting his own way. On screen, their scenes crackle with that tension. Off screen, it was part of what made the production so hard.

Hugh Griffith, Richard Haydn and a strong cast of British character actors fill out the crew. None of them gets much to do in a film this dominated by its two leads, but they give the ship the feel of a real, crowded, unhappy workplace.

The Production That Nearly Sank MGM

The troubles are well documented. Carol Reed left after clashing with Brando and the studio. Weather in Tahiti ruined weeks of shooting. The script was rewritten again and again, often at Brando’s insistence, and Brando’s habit of arguing over scenes and delaying work drove the budget far beyond anything MGM had planned.

The production lost a great deal of money and badly damaged the studio’s position for years. It also fixed Brando’s reputation as a difficult star, a reputation he didn’t shake until The Godfather ten years later. In a way it’s a cautionary tale about star power, and about what happens when nobody on a production has the authority to say no.

The Ship

MGM built a full-size, sailing replica of the Bounty in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, for the film. It’s one of the best things in the film, and it’s why the shipboard scenes feel so solid and so cramped.

The replica sailed to Tahiti under her own power and survived for fifty years afterward, as a tourist attraction, a training vessel and a set for other films. She sank off the coast of North Carolina in Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, with the loss of two lives, including her captain. In some ways that ship is the film’s biggest legacy.

Her loss, fifty years after the film, is a sad footnote to the whole story. The replica outlived almost everyone who made the film, and she remains its most lasting achievement.

How It Compares

There are three major films of the Bounty story. The 1935 version with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton is tighter, fiercer and more fun, and it won best picture. The 1984 version, The Bounty, with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins, is closer to history and gives Bligh a fairer hearing, and Hopkins is excellent.

As for the 1962 film, it sits between them: the most beautiful, the longest, and the one where the troubles behind the camera show most clearly on screen. If you only watch one, watch the 1935 film. If you want Bligh understood, watch the 1984 one. Watch this one for the color, for Tahiti and for Trevor Howard.

Where does Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) fall short?

The length, above all. It runs about three hours, and the Tahiti section alone could lose half an hour without harm. The second half feels like the work of a production that had stopped planning and started improvising. It had.

And Brando. His performance has defenders, and I understand the argument, but for me it keeps the audience at a distance from the one character we most need to care about. Howard does everything he can, and the film is at its best when it’s watching him. It’s a 6: an impressive spectacle and a flawed drama.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Mutiny on the Bounty

As a spectacle, yes. It’s a 6 because Trevor Howard and the photography carry a drama that keeps losing its nerve, with a Fletcher Christian I never quite believe at the center of it.

I’d sit through it again for the Cape Horn storm and for Howard, and I’d skip half of Tahiti without a second thought. The 1935 version is the better film, and the 1984 version is the better history.

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