Brando on the Bounty

Abstract

Film studio MGM’s 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty (hereafter 1962) accords with no one’s assumptions about the events that occurred on HMAV Bounty in 1787–89, and Marlon Brando is nobody’s idea of Fletcher Christian. This may be why the film is impossible to see at the cinema, why it never gets shown on television, and why the DVD version is harder to find in libraries than MGM’s earlier film of the same title, which was released in 1935 (hereafter 1935). That film, starring Clark Gable as Christian and Charles Laughton as William Bligh, won the 1936 Academy Award for Best Picture, and remains the canonical cinematic version of the mutiny on the Bounty. The 1962 film (with Trevor Howard as Bligh) was nominated for seven Academy Awards at the 1963 Oscars, but was blown out of the water by David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Like another contentious epic, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1962 was delayed by ‘long choosing, and beginning late’.1 Its production spanned two years and went through several writers and directors, including the uncredited Carol Reed. Although it did reasonably well at the box office, the film failed to recover its costs – a failure for which Brando (whose contract