Rent Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

Hollywood Sets Sail - Mutiny on the Bounty review by griggs

There’s something magnificently old-fashioned about Mutiny on the Bounty — a film so sturdy you can smell the salt air and feel the rope burns. Frank Lloyd steers the ship with a steady hand, keeping the grandeur intact while grounding it in human grit and defiance.

Charles Laughton’s Captain Bligh is monstrous perfection — every glare and bark a study in discipline turned cruel. Clark Gable, stripped of his trademark moustache, gives Fletcher Christian the nobility of a man who’d rather drown than kneel. It’s not subtle — the sea looks vast, the ideals clear, and the mutiny inevitable — but that’s part of its charm.

This is adventure cinema with grit, gusto, and just enough moral ambiguity to keep it afloat. A grand old yarn that reminds you why Hollywood once ruled the waves.

Epic Adventure - Mutiny on the Bounty review by Steve

MGMs ambitious historical drama is one of the grandest productions of the 1930s. It recreates the brutal conditions on a British merchant ship in 1787, the year of the famous mutiny against William Bligh (Charles Laughton) led by Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable). Laughton overacts to huge effect, making Bligh one of the great screen villains, but also a caricature.

Ships' companies were sometimes press-ganged, or co-opted convicts who had their sentences transmuted. This Bounty is crewed by a gang of expat British character actors who have to combine providing the comic relief, singing nautical ballads and dancing the hornpipe with contributing a growing background noise of justified resentment.

 It's an epic adventure yarn that tells the broad outline of history faithfully. It only really slows during the sojourn to the tropical island of Tahiti, but we do get to see the surprisingly homoerotic cavorting of the bare chested Gable and Franchot Tone. It is the unbuckling of traditional order during this stopover that makes Bligh's resumed malevolence finally unbearable.

The story looks for a balance between its two protagonists. It must ultimately side with Christian but it doesn't overlook the harmful consequences of mutiny. The film tidies up its themes too conveniently to be credible. But as a spectacle, this is magnificent. It puts the historic, seagoing way life on screen with a lively vigour. It's still the best version of this story.

Historical adventure drama - Mutiny on the Bounty review by LJ

Based on the historical event of the mutiny on the Bounty in the South Pacific Ocean in 1789, or rather a couple of novels that fictionalised this event, this is not very historically accurate at all. Inexplicably it was a major hit and won a Best Picture Oscar despite the fact that it is a boring drama.