Mutiny on the Bounty (Arcola Pictures, MGM, 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, March 7) at 7:30 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty on Turner Classic Movies. It was a film that was savaged at the time, largely due to the public disagreements between director Lewis Milestone and star Marlon Brando, which among other things alienated the other actors and caused the costs to run well over the film’s budget. The 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty would have been the 1960’s version of Heaven’s Gate if not for the even more spectacular crash and burn that year of the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton-Joseph L. Mankiewicz Cleopatra. Like Heaven’s Gate, the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty was a film I’d read trash talk about literally for decades before I finally saw it – and it was actually pretty good. The film began as a medium-budget project, a remake of a successful film from 1935 directed by Frank Lloyd (a specialist in dramas set all or largely at sea) with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as an almost demonic Captain William Bligh. The original plan for the remake was announced in 1958, with John Sturges directing, Burt Lancaster as Christian, and Spencer Tracy as Bligh. When MGM, the producing studio, signed Brando instead, Sturges dropped out. MGM hired British director Carol Reed and commissioned an exact replica of the Bounty based on the surviving plans for the original ship. Their Bounty was 106 feet long, 15 feet longer than the original, because it needed to accommodate the cameras, sound recorders, and film processing equipment, since in a vain attempt to hold down costs producer Aaron Rosenberg had decided not only to shoot on location in Tahiti but develop the film there instead of risking sending it back to Hollywood for processing. (The 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty had been shot entirely in the U.S., with Catalina Island, Hollywood’s all-purpose substitute for the South Seas, “playing” Tahiti.) Reed was on the film for months, shooting what he could without a Bounty because construction of the replica ship had run over budget and schedule, until he was either fired or quit.

Russian-born American director Lewis Milestone was hired to replace him, and as he told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in an interview for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse, “When I came on to Mutiny on the Bounty after Carol Reed left, I felt it would be an easy assignment because they’d been on it for months and there surely couldn’t be much more to do. To my dismay, I discovered that all they’d done was a seven-minute scene just before they land in Papeete, in which Trevor Howard issues instructions about obtaining island breadfruit. Marlon Brando swears he had nothing to do with Carol Reed’s departure; that was a matter between Reed and the producer. However, Carol resigned with full pay, which is not a bad way to go.” According to some reports, Brando was happy to work with Milestone because he’d long been a fan of Milestone’s anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and Milestone told Higham and Greenberg that Brando was actually easy to work with for the first two weeks or so that he was on the project. During that time Milestone enjoyed working with the British actors in the cast, including Trevor Howard and Richard Harris (Milestone and Harris became and remained friends). “Then the trouble started,” Milestone said. “I would say that what basically went wrong with Mutiny on the Bounty was that the producer made a number of promises to Marlon Brando which he subsequently couldn’t keep. It was an impossible situation because, right or wrong, the man simply took charge of everything. You had the option of sitting and watching him or turning your back on him. Neither the producers nor I could do anything about it.” Maybe Brando’s take-charge attitude came from the fact that he came to Bounty right after finishing One-Eyed Jacks, a quirky Western (and another monumentally underrated film) in which he directed himself for the first and only time, and it’s possible that having just served as his own director he had a hard time getting used to working under someone else’s guidance. (Brando had originally started One-Eyed Jacks with Stanley Kubrick as his director, but early on he’d fired Kubrick and taken over the direction himself – which freed Kubrick to take over another troubled production for a producer/star, Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus.) One Brando biographer, Gary Carey, said that Milestone was particularly offended when Brando started wearing cotton earplugs around the set. (A later Brando director, Gillo Pontecorvo, said Brando did that on his film with him, Burn!, but Pontecorvo accepted it because the film was an international production and he could see why Brando might want to cut himself off from the cacophony of various actors from various countries speaking different languages.)

Brando, in turn, blamed the cost overruns on Mutiny on the Bounty on the fact that they didn’t have a completed script when they went into production. Screenwriter Charles Lederer was on the location writing it as they went along, and according to Milestone, Brando and Lederer would have daily meetings in which they would hash out the script without inviting Milestone to participate. By the time those meetings ended, Milestone said, “It was about 2:30 and we hadn’t shot a scene. You had the option of shooting it, but since Marlon Brando was going to supervise it anyway, I waited until someone yelled, ‘Camera!,” and I went off to sit down somewhere and read the paper.” I first saw the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty with my ideas about it largely formed by Milestone’s The Celluloid Muse interview and the widespread criticism of Brando’s performance as being too nellie, almost Gay. I was quite surprised by how effective he was as Christian, and this time around I was also impressed by at least one thing about Lederer’s script. He depicted the clash between Bligh and Christian in class-conscious terms; he wrote Bligh as a self-made man from humble origins who had worked himself up to a command position in the British navy, while Christian was an aristocratic fop who was imposed on Bligh as his second-in-command at the last minute because the previous officer suddenly caught sick on the eve of the voyage. While this is apparently historically inaccurate – in real life both Bligh and Christian came from relatively comfortable but not spectacularly wealthy middle-class families – it creates a powerful motivator for their on-screen conflicts. The conflict is made explicit in a late scene in which Bligh is court-martialed and acquitted by a judge (the great character actor Henry Daniell in an oddly uncredited appearance; I didn’t recognize him immediately but I knew I’d heard that voice somewhere before) who announces that the affair of the Bounty proved the rectitude of the British government’s usual policy of picking its officers from the aristocracy. (That was actually a long-standing problem for Britain; they hired upper-class people to run their military whether they were actually any good at it or not. Occasionally they lucked out and got someone like the Duke of Wellington, who was not only an aristocrat but also a military genius, but most of the time the British fought their wars under unimpressive commanders and it makes one wonder how they were able to conquer as much of the world as they did.)

I found myself wondering if the writers of the 1995 film Crimson Tide, Michael Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick, copied this gimmick from the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty, since Crimson Tide is also about a mutiny caused by a clash between an older captain (Gene Hackman) and a second-in-command (Denzel Washington) forced upon him when his previous assistant gets sick on the eve of a voyage, and in Crimson Tide the antagonism is not only class-based but race-based as well. And regarding Brando’s reading of Fletcher Christian, he’s certainly nowhere near as butch as Clark Gable (or Errol Flynn, who’d played Christian in a little-known 1933 Australian film called In the Wake of the “Bounty,” which dramatized the mutiny as an historical prologue to a documentary on the survivors of Pitcairn Island; MGM bought the American rights so it wouldn’t be released in competition with the Gable film and sliced off the documentary portions for two “Passing Parade” shorts, Primitive Pitcairn and Pitcairn Island Today), but his portrayal has its own dignity and inner strength. Brando’s voice as Christian is surprisingly strong, with excellent diction, It’s basically the same voice he’d used as Mark Antony in MGM’s film of Julius Caesar nine years earlier, which had surprised a lot of people at the time. When Brando had been announced for Antony, various comedians and impressionists had had a field day doing the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in the voice of Stanley Kowalski, which is not at all how Brando sounded in the actual film. It’s also a fascinating film to watch today, given how Donald Trump is bullying the world, because Bligh’s whole leadership philosophy is very Trumpian: in a speech beautifully delivered by Trevor Howard, who portrays Bligh not as the figure of almost supernatural evil Charles Laughton did but as a man in desperately over his head and forced to maintain discipline in the only way he knows, he explains that the only way to keep order on his ship is through instilling enough fear in the crew members that they obey his orders because of the hugely drastic consequences if they don’t.

It’s also fascinating in that the breadfruit themselves, which the British government was importing as slave food for the captive African populations in Jamaica, become a quite effective MacGuffin. First we’re told by the ship’s botanist, William Brown (Richard Haydn), that the breadfruit have a dormancy period that starts in October and lasts for about five months thereafter. During that time, any attempt to cut or transplant the breadfruit will kill them. In order to make his tight biologically imposed time line, Bligh first orders the crew to take the dangerous westward route to Tahiti via Cape Horn in South America. Then, when the storms on that route make it too dangerous for the voyage to continue, Bligh reverses course (in both senses) and sails east around the Cape of Good Hope off South Africa, thereby missing the October deadline and leading to the crew’s five-month stay in Tahiti, when the bounds of discipline break down and the crew members have a jolly old time screwing the available and willing Tahitian women. There are some nice bits of dialogue about the mutual incomprehension between the white and Tahitian characters about their sexual mores; in one scene Bligh orders Christian to stop making love to the Tahitian princess Maimiti (Tarita), only to find out that by doing so he’s insulted her father, Chief Hitihiti (Mathairii Tama). As a result the king forbids the Bounty crew to take any breadfruit until Christian makes up for the “insult” by making love to Maimiti after all – which Christian is all too willing to do. (The ancient Polynesians came as close as any human culture ever has to a totally sexually free environment, but they had an enormous advantage that’s impossible to duplicate now: no sexually transmitted diseases. Those microbes didn’t exist in their environment until whites brought them in, and when I first read that I thought, “That’s white people for you. We ruin everything.”) The breadfruit also precipitate the mutiny; when the plants start dying and Brown explains to Bligh that that’s due to the lack of water, Bligh immediately orders the water caskets closed and says that any sailor who wants a drink of water will have to climb the top mast to get the ladle for it. One desperately ill sailor tries this and falls to his death on the Bounty’s deck, and another drinks seawater out of thirst and desperation. It is Christian’s insistence on giving the man the fresh water the ship’s doctor says he needs, along with Bligh’s order that the dead man’s mate be keelhauled (an already illegal punishment that involved tying a man to a rope, throwing him overboard, and letting the ship tow him; it’s a punishment that almost no one survived, and in the film he gets eaten by a shark ex machina) that leads Christian to slap Bligh and start the mutiny.

The 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty certainly has its problems, including a 178-minute running time that makes the story seem padded (by contrast, the 1935 version ran 132 minutes, an unusually long film for the time but one which would have left 1962 audiences feeling short-changed); an ultra-slow pace that probably indicates the director’s lack of interest in the project as he went through hell making it; and a wildly fictionalized ending. In the movie Fletcher Christian orders the mutinous crew to set sail from Pitcairn Island (where they’ve settled because it was misidentified on British naval charts and therefore the British Navy couldn’t find them there) to British jurisdiction to turn themselves in and bring Bligh to justice for his actions. The other crew members, unwilling to risk being executed for the mutiny, refuse and burn the Bounty to make it impossible for Christian to return. In reality, Christian was killed by the Tahitian men he’d brought along on the Bounty after the mutiny who resented the way the British were trying to turn them into virtual slaves. In the film, Christian dies in an heroic attempt to rescue the ship’s sextant, and gets a death scene of such extended histrionics – directed, according to imdb.com, by George Seaton rather than Milestone – even an opera composer like Verdi or Puccini would have probably thought it was too long. Nonetheless, despite its longueurs and the Tahitian scenes, which seem racially insensitive today and probably did for at least some viewers in 1962 as well, the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty holds up surprisingly well and contains one of Marlon Brando’s better performances (and I say that as a decided non-fan of Brando generally; frankly I think he was at his worst in his most butch performances, like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, and when he got his big comeback role in The Godfather I loved the film overall but didn’t care for his schticky overacting). And one irony of this film is that Brando fell in love with Tarita for real, living with her and buying an entire island (Tetiaroa, near Tahiti) to be with her when he wasn’t working; ironically, Brando’s second wife, the Mexican actress Movita Castaneda, had played the equivalent role to Tarita’s in the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty.