Mutiny on the Bounty – (Academy Award for Best Picture in 1935 with a total of eight nominations – the only time in Oscar history in which three actors were nominated for Best Actor from the same film; b/w) In 1787 the HMS Bounty left Portsmouth, England, for a two-year voyage under the command of Captain William Bligh (Charles Laughton) bound for Tahiti to bring one thousand bread-fruit plants back to England to be used as cheap food to feed slaves on colonial plantations. The tyrannical Capt Bligh treated his crew like slaves, flogging them mercilessly and depriving them of human rights and full rations.

When the ship departed Tahiti, First Officer Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable) finally turned on his captain and led most of the crew in a rebellion, casting Capt Bligh and his loyalists adrift in an open boat. Incredibly Capt Bligh navigated the small craft across 3500 miles of ocean with seamanship and courage to safety; he then returned to Tahiti in the HMS Pandora, determined to find Fletcher Christian. Catching sight of the approaching British vessel, Christian and 27 others, including nine white sailors, escaped in The Bounty, knowing if they were caught they’d be hanged for mutiny and piracy, eventually settling on the previously uninhabited Pitcairn Island.

On Tahiti Capt Bligh captured a handful of the mutineers, those who had decided against departing with Christian, along with the idealistic Midshipman Roger Byam (Franchot Tone), who was not guilty of mutiny, but the ship ran against a reef while vainly trying to locate The Bounty, costing the admiralty yet another ship. Back in England Byam and the others were court martialled. Of the three screen versions I’ve seen of the historical novel (first of a trilogy) by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, I remain partial to the one with Marlon Brando. Included in the special features on the DVD is a short feature, Pitcairn Island Today, filmed 150 years after the mutiny, describing the life of the mixed-heritage descendents of Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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