The Oscars. Well that happened. Anne Hathoway had a total nervous breakdown in front of a world wide audience while James Franco was presumably getting high as shit offstage somewhere. He even forgot that King’s Speech won Best Picture right after it happened. The King’s Speech won, naturally, because it reaffirms our very contemporary belief in individualism and the power of the one to rise above the many. WWII was a time of solidarity, community, and nationally identity building (just look at any movie actually made during WWII), but for our generation, only the most back-patting, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic tale will do. “That’s what I am all about,” we the audience are to say, “I’m all about individuality sticking it to The Man, station be damned.” We leave the theater feeling very good about ourselves and our ability to overcome adversity through individuality and personality. It’s a conservative movie befitting our conservative era.
Although we can argue back and forth ad nauseum about the validity and significance of the Academy Awards, we’ll never get very far. They are what they are, and like it or not there’ll be another one next year. Regardless of whether the Oscars actually recognize the true Best Picture in a given year, their choices can be illuminating. They tell us what was valued as a nation and as an industry at a given time. They capture a snapshot in time, and are often as decent a starting place as any when looking into a new era of movies you are unfamiliar with.
In that spirit, I recently checked out 1935 Best Picture winner Mutiny on the Bounty. Featuring two of the greatest stars of the 1930s – Clark Gable and Charles Laughton – Mutiny on the Bounty is the fictionalized true story of the famed mutiny against the vicious Capt. Bligh on the British naval ship the HSM Bounty in 1789. That the mutiny occurred is true. That Bligh was such an insufferable demon as he is portrayed here by Charles Laughton is less clear, but it makes for good cinema. Everything in Mutiny on the Bounty is manufactured for maximum anti-dictatorial impact. We are squarely on the side of the mutineers. The movie opens with innocent townspeople conscripted into the King’s Navy against their will. Onboard the sailors are forced to suffer terrible hardship, not only due to the unavoidably sticky business of pre-modern sea travel, but more terribly at the hands of their malicious, sadistic captain.
I mean, this guy is a #1 asshole. He orders a man flogged even after he's dead. He accuses his men of stealing rations even though he was the one who stole them. He ties complainers up in the sun spread-eagle to bake for hours without water. He even has a guy keelhauled. If you don't know what that is, look it up. So fucked. Charles Laughton is one of my very favorite actors, and while he is predictably great as Bligh, it is not amongst his most outstanding roles. Dare I say a sadistic, piggish fiend is a little bit on the nose for Laughton’s physique. He fared much better when his weight and face were counterbalanced by more nuanced mannerisms, as in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Witness for the Prosecution. Here, Laughton is a one-dimensional caricature of a villain. It’s a fine performance, but he isn’t given much to work with.
Clark Gable is great as Fletcher Christian, Bligh's first mate and the eventual leader of the mutineers, but having just seen It Happened One Night and Gone with the Wind for the first time recently, his work here just can't compare. Gable excels at the charming rogue. It's an admittedly limited range, but he's awfully good at it. He gets to flex those muscles as Christian, but flounders a little when dealing with the complex moral implications of high mutiny.
Mutiny also features performances by a few character actors who will be recognizable if you’re familiar at all with 1930s Hollywood pictures. Most notably, Herbert Mundin, who many will remember as the peasant who shoots the deer in the King’s forest in Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, mugs at the camera as Bligh’s cabin hand. It's lukewarm comic relief. The running gag where he can’t figure out what side of the ship to throw Bligh’s toilet water off of is a real clunker.
The scope of Mutiny on the Bounty astounds. Director Frank Lloyd must have had his hands full. I can't imagine the nightmare of shooting film with water splashing all around today let alone in 1935. My eye didn’t catch any stock footage of sea voyage. Even the long establishing shots are specifically of the Bounty itself. In other words, this production must have been impossibly epic, requiring a great deal of both stage and location shooting. I’m not sure which island the production used for Tahiti, but it looks legitimately tropical, and not just in the establishing shots. Mutiny is a truly lavish production, one of the great black and white epics, when there was such a thing before Gone with the Wind. Though I prefer the Michael Curtiz/Errol Flynn swashbuckler Captain Blood, which came out the same year, Mutiny on the Bounty makes that movie look like amateur hour just in terms of scale and scope.
The crew of the Mutiny make an extended stay on the island of Tahiti. The movie’s portrayal of the natives is about as problematic as you would expect for a movie from 1935. On the one hand, many Tahitians are given prominent speaking roles. Their culture is never played for cheap gags or shown in anything less than a positive light. On the other hand, Tahiti appears to be some kind of Eden before the Fall, where there is no trouble at all, and everyone lays around on the beach eating bananas all day. Let’s not forget, it’s a Eurocentric movie, and the Tahitians are childlike compared to the world weary and wise Europeans. But it could have been a lot worse.
Mutiny’s third act, following the expulsion of Captain Bligh, is shakier than the rest of the picture. Everything in the two acts leading up to the mutiny is taut and singular in purpose. The tension between Bligh and Christian is ratcheted up to the breaking point. The editing is ruthless. It’s unfortunate that the aftermath of the mutiny is not as focused. We meander through the outcomes for various characters with little purpose and less steam. It’s the nature of the story, I suppose, but it’s unsatisfying compared to the perfect moviemaking that came before.
What’s more, Lloyd confusingly chooses to celebrate Bligh’s famed, near impossible navigation of hundreds of miles of open ocean in a tiny boat after being expelled from the Bounty. After what an insufferable bastard he’s been for two hours up to this point, why are we made to celebrate his nautical cunning? In the end, many of our heroes are hung for mutiny, others fade into the mist, and Bligh is given a slap on the wrist, muted by the fact that everyone is so impressed by his seamanship. This may all be historically accurate, but it doesn’t satisfy the thematic conditions set up by Mutiny on the Bounty’s first, better half.
-Ben