Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

Mutiny on the Bounty is an American romantic film drama first released in 1962, directed by Lewis Milestone and Carol Reed.  The film is based on a novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall and stars Marlon Brando, Trevor Howard, Richard Harris, Hugh Griffith and Richard Haydn.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


In 1787, the HMS Bounty sets sail from Portsmouth, England, bound for the island of Tahiti.  There, specimens of breadfruit plant are to be gathered and transported to Jamaica, to provide a cheap food supply for plantation slaves.  Captain William Bligh governs his crew with an iron hand and shows no mercy if they should dare to step out of line.  The relish with which Bligh dishes out punishment appals his second-in-command, First Lieutenant Fletcher Christian.  In a foolhardy attempt to shorten the sea crossing by several months, Bligh gives the order to sail westwards, around Cape Horn, despite the treacherous winter storms that they well surely encounter.  When this proves to be impracticable, Bligh has no choice but to take the safer route, around the southern coast of Africa, but he blames his men for the time that has been lost.  Arriving in Tahiti, the crew of the Bounty find themselves in a tropical paradise, where the natives are not only friendly but over-willing when it comes to sharing the fruits of nature, including free love.   To impress his superiors and atone for the delay in his arrival, Bligh takes on board twice as many breadfruit plants as he was instructed to do.  Not long after the ship has left Tahiti, the plants begin to die because there is insufficient water for them all.  To save his precious cargo of plants, Bligh has no option but to strictly reduce his crew’s water rations.  Deprived of water, the men soon become hostile towards Bligh and, after one dies through thirst, even Fletcher Christian is provoked into turning against the captain.  When Christian offers water to another man who drank sea water to quench his thirst, Bligh strikes him.  It is the last straw.  Christian turns on the captain and, supported by the mutinous crew, he takes command of the Bounty.  As Bligh and his few loyal crew members are loaded into a longboat and set adrift in the Pacific Ocean, the captain swears that if ever he gets back to England he will arrange for warships to be sent out to hunt down the mutineers and bring them to justice...

For all its lavish production values, epic scale and colossal budget, this adaptation of Mutiny on the Bounty fails to live up to the excellence of MGM’s 1935 version, the classic in which Charles Laughton starred as cinema’s definitive Captain Bligh.  This was the first film to make use of the Ultra Panavision 70 widescreen process and the results are spectacular, particularly the location sequences, which capture the awesome natural splendour of Tahiti as vividly as a Gauguin painting.  The storm sequences set on board the Bounty are just as impressive and were a technical achievement for the time when the film was made.  

There is just one thing that prevents this film from being an all-time classic, and that is the truly horrific miscasting of Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian.  Brando insisted on playing the part as an English fop and consequently gives a performance that alternates between theatrical absurdity and grotesque caricature (of the kind you would find in a 1950s British comedy).   Brando may have been sincere in his work, but he singularly fails to make his character remotely convincing.  Just how is an audience to take Christian Fletcher seriously if he is played as a foppish poseur who looks as though he would be more at home making soft furnishings than commanding a naval vessel in the 18th Century?  With his effete mannerisms and forced vocal impersonation of an Eton schoolboy, Brando shamelessly manages to reduce the entire production to the level of an extravagant parody.  This is in spite of the generally laudable contributions from his co-stars, particularly Trevor Howard, who makes a pretty respectable Captain Bligh.

By this stage in his career, Marlon Brando had acquired a reputation as a problem actor – unpredictable, hot-headed and difficult to get on with.  He came close to scuppering the production with his much publicised antics, which included organising impromptu parties and roping members of the crew into working on the decorations for a friend’s wedding.  It was Brando who had a hand in Lewis Milestone replacing Carol Reed as the film’s director early into the location shoot and it was Brando who was at least partly to blame for the film’s costly overrun. 

Despite the escalating production difficulties, the making of this film was to have a profound impact on Brando’s personal life.  He fell in love with Tarita Teriipia, the Tahitian beauty who played his character’s love interest in the film, and would marry her a short time later.  So taken was he by the simple way of life of the Tahitians that Brando bought the Tetiaroa atoll (the refuge for three of the real-life deserters from the Bounty), where he installed a private resort and environmental research laboratory.  It was through Teriipia that Brando became fluent in French, although their marriage would only last ten years.  Whilst many regard Mutiny on the Bounty as one of the low points of Brando’s career, it also marked the beginning of one of the happier phases of the actor’s life.

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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