GROSS/25 1935 - a maritime blockbuster that passed into the culture
Mutiny on the Bounty - thrills at sea, cruelty, revolt and revenge.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY, FRANK LLOYD, METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER, 1935, 132 MINUTES. CHARLES LAUGHTON, CLARK GABLE, FRANCHOT TONE
This is a grand studio adventure, expensive and enormously ambitious - two three-masted ships were sailed all the way to Tahiti for the location scenes; a true story simplified to fit the action-drama format. Alongside the jaw-dropping story of the HMS Bounty and that momentous mutiny - as you’ll expect, if you’ve been reading this stuff for a bit - is another, jaw-dropping story. That one’s about naval dominance, the global reach of the British Empire, slavery and the deep integration of military power with capital and science in the era of imperial expansion.
The story of the Bounty and its Captain and its bolshy crew is unarguably thrilling. There really aren’t many workplace dramas that lead to multiple deaths, courts martial and executions and, more, that have left a tangible, human trace in the geography of the modern world - a community that still occupies an island in the Pacific that is, as a result, Britain’s only possession there.
If you’d like to skip the bit where I bang on about Breadfruit and imperialism and just read about the film, scroll down to ‘Insolence and mystical talent’.
The mission
The Bounty was a three-masted merchant ship, converted for use by the Royal Navy. Its mission expresses late 18th Century Britain’s Imperial status vividly. Captain Bligh and his crew, which included scientists and pressed men, are sailing to Tahiti (one of the longest journeys it would be possible for a British vessel to make - a huge logistical and human challenge) to locate and harvest Breadfruit plants. The plants would then - if the mission hadn’t been upended by the mutiny - have been taken to Jamaica where they were going to be experimentally cultivated as a cheap source of calories for the growing enslaved population. The fusion, in the management of the British Empire, of economics, science and raw military aggression is clearly visible here.
The two journeys together - Portsmouth to Tahiti to Jamaica - would have added up to over 40,000 nautical miles - around the earth one-and-a-half times. You could hardly find a clearer illustration of the scope of British economic and military power at this time. Britain, from the pinnacle of history’s biggest empire, on a rainy island in the North Atlantic, was able to reach around the earth to transplant a food crop 12,000 miles to feed a population already brutally transplanted thousands of miles from home. Only a handful of nations had the entrepreneurial imagination to conceive of something on this scale and it’s likely that in this moment only one had the wherewithall to actually do it.
The task of transplanting Breadfruit to the West Indies wasn’t a small one - many ships were involved, dozens of round-trips were made. A maritime supply-chain was set up, ultimately a huge operation that brought together state, capital and science - botanists located the crop in the Pacific, plantation owners in the West Indies saw the promise of a productive new food crop to allow them to increase the number of slaves they could hold and the British Navy happily joined the operation to provide logistics and security.
The colonial possessions in the West Indies that would become the productive backbone of the Empire were mostly quite recently acquired - by conquest or by treaty (or usually by a messy combination of the two) - and were still in the development phase. There was no meaningful separation between state and business here - planters and processors of sugarcane had been working with government officials and scientists to optimise production for years. There were already hundreds of plantations in Jamaica alone, each with an average of 150 slaves. Feeding this workforce was becoming a big issue - especially as more and more land was set aside for the primary crop, sugarcane.
So this is the context in which we meet Captain William Bligh, the young naval officer charged with pulling off this high-pressure mission. We learn that he was a bit of a brute and definitely not a people person but the truth is he was probably a good leader and administrator and his cruelty was not in any way exceptional - pretty close to the norm for ships of this kind, in fact. Let’s say his interpersonal skills were weak but he got the job done (up to a point obvs).
In the movie as in various other retellings of this story, Bligh’s redeeming features - his attention to the health of his crew, for instance, which is recorded in the ship’s log, and his evident brilliance as a navigator - are deleted in favour of the nasty ones, including some killings and floggings (and some stealing of cheese) that we know never happened.
In the navy
It’s 1787. The British Navy is the biggest and best-armed on earth. The Empire’s 19th Century glory is not far away. The global reach and offensive power of the British Navy was critical to the whole project - making it possible for the Empire to be run as a kind of arms-reach military dictatorship - democracy and peace at home, hard-edged military supervision abroad.
George Orwell thought the navy was pretty important:
A navy employs comparatively few people, and it is an external weapon which cannot affect home politics directly. Military dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots.
George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius
The state in Mutiny on the Bounty is recognisably Orwell’s, but at the other end of the Imperial golden age he was describing - the upswing as it were. A state that projects power via a large and invulnerable navy can keep all the violence and repression over the horizon, in international waters, in distant territories. For Orwell, this explains England’s 150 years of Imperial dominance but also its resitance to despotism (and revolution) at home. The British Empire was two states, fused - one violent, arbitrary and exploitive; the other an increasingly prosperous, modern and (relatively) democratic nation.
Insolence and mystical talent
Meanwhile, aboard the Bounty, Captain Bligh is played by Charles Laughton. The RADA-trained actor, born in Scarborough in 1899, was 35 - a couple of years older than Bligh himself when he commanded this expedition. Laughton inhabits the role so fully and so self-consciously that for years afterwards, music hall impressionists used to include a bit of Laughton’s Bligh in their acts - “Mister Christian!” they’d declaim, in a sort of Shakespearean way. Laughton was only a few years into his long series of monsters, historic figures and generally larger-than-life movie men. His film breakthrough was in the title role in The Private Life of Henry VIII, in which he adds twenty years to his actual 33 and, right at the end, turns and addresses the camera and flips the whole thing upside-down thrillingly. He often played father to actors who were barely younger than him. In James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) his bluff, Northern industrialist must be 60.
David Thomson says that Laughton was self-conscious about his looks and his figure when on set with impeccable specimen Clark Gable. I can see it, he’s taut with nervous self-importance - standing up straight, sucking his tummy in - the definition of up-tight. But there’s a seething magnificence to this tightly-wound man - standing at the stern of an open boat haranguing Fletcher Christian from a distance of twenty or thirty yards. We’re falling in love with fragile, courageous, blustering Captain Bligh right here - and this is the moment his redemption begins, of course. By the time he and his charges reach Australia he’s a hero, keelhauling or not.
Laughton was clever, thoughtful and intense. Michael Powell called him “an almost mystically talented actor.” While he was living in Los Angeles after the war he and his friend Bertolt Brecht wrote an English-language version of Life of Galileo. Laughton then played the title role in a two-week run at the Coronet Theatre directed by Joseph Losey.
Gable, on the other hand, who plays the ship’s lieutenant and lead mutineer (and founder of a whole island population) Fletcher Christian, is so relaxed it’s hard to take his passion for insurrection seriously. He had to shave his moustache off for the role but that’s the extent of his adjustments. He doesn’t even try an English accent.
Gable’s insolence is his calling card, of course, and he sees no reason to vary it here. He breezes through his lines, briefly hardens his demeanor during the mutiny but otherwise smirks amiably throughout, as if driving his convertible down to the coast or teeing off at the country club - even during the floggings. I’ll be honest, if I’d been Gable’s captain I’d have had him thrown overboard before we were out of sight of land, with his irritating, barely-contained grin and his self-righteous tone.
Verité?
We have a Ridley Scott’s Napoleon situation here - a complicated true story from history reduced to a bunch of archetypes and stock situations for a movie. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Some of my favourite movies reduce complicated history to simple drama - notably every war movie ever made. The movie’s narrative arc is simple and comprehensible. A great adventure that audiences may not even have known was based on truth.
On the long journey from Portsmouth to Tahiti and then on to Jamaica, Captain Bligh’s arbitrary and cruel regime causes Gable’s Fletcher Christian, a humane senior officer whose role seems to be roughly that of a benign deputy headmaster, to rise up against Bligh’s tyranny. There’s some argy-bargy (also exaggerated) and the Captain is set adrift in an open boat with 18 loyal sailors, a bit of food and a barrel of water, 3,500 nautical miles from their only realistic destination. The fact that they actually made it, at huge cost - ultimately most of the 19 died from the effects of the journey - is the story’s other jaw-dropping element - and further evidence of Bligh’s obvious competence as a sailor and a leader of men.
The mutineers, meanwhile, return to Tahiti to lounge around on the beach with their local girlfriends but, soon enough, when the Navy comes back to arrest them (the Navy never forgets), they fire up the Bounty which has been straining at anchor in the bay since the mutiny, and head off to find a safer home - they wind up on remote, uninhabited Pitcairn, where the descendents of the crew remain to this day. It was probably a pretty good choice - truly remote and very inaccessible (even now there’s no airstrip and no harbour). The Bounty is burnt at anchor (it’s still there, at the bottom of Bounty Bay) so as not to attract attention.
Bligh, of course (he’s still a young man), is soon back at sea and returns to the Breadfruit mission. There are Breadfruit growing in the West Indies today that are descended from the plants he brought with him from Tahiti. The mixed bag of mutineers and loyalists who returned to Britain are put on trial. Bligh gives evidence and - guess what - all the ordinary seamen are sentenced to death and quickly hanged but the baby-faced officer with connections is pardoned by the King. Boom. There’s your class structure.
The public attention that the trial and the mutiny got, though, is said to have permanently altered the treatment of sailors in the navy (yoga classes, smoothie bars and so on). The navy carried on ‘pressing’ crew, though, lifting men from ordinary life and disappearing them for years at sea without a choice, until after the Napoleonic wars.
A movie can sometimes collapse together history and notoriety, celebrity and significance, in a wonderful, surprising way. Mutiny on the Bounty did this, although it was not itself a great film. It’s a treasure, though and Gable and Laughton between them produced enough raw story in their Hollywood lives to fund a dozen Netflix series.
In this country, servicemen and women, stationed at home, have historically had to keep a low profile. They try not to be out in public in uniform and are rarely called up to enforce the law or to repress the population (there have been exceptions). The police here have a substantially more civilian profile than they do elsewhere - there’s no gendarmerie, no militarised national police force.
Laughton was married to another eccentric British Hollywood incomer, Bride of Frankenstein Elsa Lanchester, for over thirty years, although everyone says he was gay or bisexual or anyway devoted to someone else. They were both outsiders - awkward and sensitive really - and neither met their full potential in Hollywood.
You’ll see credits for Movita and Mamo - American actors with sufficiently ‘exotic’ profiles to play Tahitian women. Neither was Tahitian.
Gable may have been grimly self-satisfied on screen but his life did not lack for drama and generosity. His second world war adventures alone would make a great movie.
A Simpsons episode from season 17 has a Mutiny on the Bounty segment. Principal Skinner is Bligh and Bart is Christian.
Laughton loved and admired Bertolt Brecht and thought he had let the playwright down: “…the actors as a whole failed this great man miserably in our production of Galileo. The demands he makes on actors are much the same as the demands that Shakespeare made on actors in the Elizabethan days. This is pretty strong and you could never print this, but I believe there is Shakespeare, and then Brecht.”
Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list and here’s another top-grossing list.