Of all the movies in this set of five naval epics, Mutiny on the Bounty is the one most likely to be familiar to American audiences, primarily because of the film’s association with that notorious freebooter Marlon Brando, who seized upon the role of Fletcher Christian at the height of his career. Much of the film was shot on location in Tahiti and Polynesia, and the budget for the film enabled the construction of a purpose-built replica of the HMS Bounty, significantly larger than the original in order to leave room for cameras and shooting crew.
The replica Bounty was approximately twice the size of the historical HMS Bounty, 180 feet long and 31 feet wide as opposed to the original’s 90 feet by 24 feet. She was a real sailing ship, built in Nova Scotia and sailed to Tahiti for the movie. She did have motors aboard and went on to be a tourist vessel based in Greenport, New York. She sank off North Carolina during Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 with the loss of two crew, Captain Robert Walbridge and Claudene Christian, who seems to have believed she was a descendant of Fletcher Christian, the leader of the historical HMS Bounty mutineers, although she was not. In 2013, the long-form journalistic website The Atavist published an investigative essay on the loss of the ship and events thereafter.
| Director | Lewis Milestone |
| Starring | Marlon Brando, Trevor Howard, Richard Harris |
| Links | IMDB. Rotten Tomatoes score: 68. TMDB: Mutiny on the Bounty. JustWatch streaming info. |
Brando famously cast a Tahitian as his love interest, Terita Teriipaia, who would become his wife and the mother of two of his kids and it appears that some of Brando’s colorful politics and career as an activist stem in part from his experiences while working on this film.
There is a well-regarded 1935 adaptation of the tale, also an MGM vehicle, which is little seen today due to the ubiquity of the 1962 production. Both films are based on a 1932 novel of the same name by Charles Norhoff and James Norman Hall.
The director credit goes to Lewis Milestone, whose previous best known work is 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front, but apparently Brando essentially commandeered direction of the film on-set. This is said to be one of the causes fer the film’s commercial failure, earning about $7.4 million at release on an estimated $19 million budget. The film’s production was troubled and generated negative publicity. This appears to be reflected in reviews of the time which tend to focus criticism at Brando’s performance, a performance that is generally admired today. Brando’s reputation soured after the film and his next major role was as the rascally buccaneer Don Coreleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather.
The real-life Captain Bligh went on to a long and varied naval career including a concluding stint as the Governor of New South Wales which resulted in his arrest and imprisonment by the New South Wales Corps, an act later declared an illegal mutiny.
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