Best Picture #8: Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

Mutiny on the Bounty is kind of hard to form a strong opinion about. It's another Clark Gable movie--he seems to be typecast as men who are mild assholes with good hearts. Here he plays Fletcher Christian, the eventual lead mutineer against the tyrannical Captain Bligh. Not that we don't take forever to get to the actual mutiny. We spend a massive amount of time establishing Bligh as the World's Worst Human Being (recall Hitler was in power when this movie was made in 1934, though no parallels are ever drawn between the two; this movie's idea of World's Worst Human Being is "Dude Who Refuses to Admit to a Mistake and Instead Doubles Down"--Bligh reminds me more of Trump than Hitler). Then we get an extended period with the crew just fooling around on Tahiti before we finally get to the titular mutiny. I assume this was to give Gable someone to ravish for the benefit of the women in the audience--he spends about ten seconds with a Tahitian woman (played of course by a white woman in an attempt at native dress) before they're having sex. Oddly, the publicity images for the movie seem to have mostly focused on this relationship rather than what the movie's actually about, which is the conflict between Bligh and Christian where neither of them really comes out ahead at the end even though Christian is clearly the one whose ideals are in the right place. Bligh doesn't get his revenge--Christian escapes capture--but Christian and the rest can never return to England and instead have to live out the rest of their lives on a tiny dot in the Pacific.
The movie takes an odd turn after the mutiny of having us almost sympathize with Bligh, adrift in his little boat with some of the men loyal to him, showing him inspiring them not to give up and actually displaying something resembling compassion. Then it's right back to World's Worst Human Being. I assume this was done to show us Bligh is more complex than he first appears, but it mostly feels out of place since we spent so much time before and after this sequence establishing his Worst Ever-ness. There are of course issues with historical accuracy, and though the mutiny did indeed happen, there has been much debate about how awful Bligh really was--certainly not as tyrannical and coldhearted as this movie depicts. In real life the mutineers who survived in the Pacific mostly finished each other off Lord of the Flies-style, so they certainly weren't saints. Indeed, they seem to have taken their freedom from the rule of law a bit far. But this movie is in fact based on a novel, which was based on the real life story, so most of the gross inaccuracies are overlook-able if not forgivable for the sake of telling a story.
Watched: July 6, 2017