And The Fish Flew

Mutiny on the Bounty. It was just a drop in the bucket to begin with. On the morning of April 28, 1789, goes one version of the story. Captain William Bligh of H.M.S. Bounty refused to give a drink of water to a dying man and his crew staged a mutiny. The incident inspired a trilogy of bestselling novels (1932-34) by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, and a supercolossal saga of the sea (1935) starring Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh. In 1959, figuring that the public was ready to stretch its sea legs again, M-G-M decided to refloat The Bounty. So the wind blew and the fish flew, and by the time MGM's weary crew got back from Tahiti it had used up two directors (Carol Reed and Lewis Milestone), a dozen scriptwriters, one year and $18.5 million.

Is the picture really worth all that? Not really. But for 120 of its 179 minutes. The Bounty wallops along at a merry clip and proves splendidly seeworthy. Captain Bligh (Trevor Howard) and Lieutenant Christian (Brando), bound for Tahiti to pick up a cargo of breadfruit seedlings, commence a duel of wills as soon as they put to sea. When the captain gives a seaman 24 cuts of the cat for calling him a thief, the lieutenant reasonably inquires: "If one punishes a man so severely for a minor infraction, what does one do for a serious offense?" When the captain turns the ship unexpectedly, causing a tun of water to crush another seaman, the lieutenant icily lets him know that he is a murderer.

Day by day the captain grows more cruel, day by day the fo'c'sle grows more hungry for revenge. The lieutenant does what he can to mitigate the tension, but only the landfall at Tahiti prevents an explosion. There, while the seamen cultivate breadfruit trees and brown-skinned beauties, the tension relents and even the captain learns to hula. But when the Bounty spreads sail for Jamaica, Bligh's brutalities resume. To save water for the breadfruit trees, he denies it to the crew. In a rage the lieutenant takes over the ship, sets Bligh and his supporters adrift in an open boat. But then, realizing the ruin he has brought upon himself and all his men, he collapses.

The picture collapses with him. From here out, The Bounty wanders through the hoarse platitudes of witless optimism ("The Blighs will lose!")* until at last it is swamped with sentimental bilge ("I loved you more than I knew"). Fortunately, there are compensations. Robert Surtees' color photography is handsome, and the two principals are diversely fascinating. As Clark Gable ploddingly played the lieutenant, he was a stouthearted, simple-minded man's man who refused to live a dog's life. As Brando rather too trickily imagines him, he is a fop to his fingertips but an aristocrat to the core, a man whom noblesse obliges to be considerate, even of such as Bligh. As Laughton vaudevillainously depicted the captain, he was a soft little sadist of doubtful sex, the sort of fat boy who pulls wings off flies and grows up to pull limbs off men. As Howard more sympathetically portrays the brute, he is the prototype of the iron man in the wooden ship, the gruff old sea dog whose bite is worse than his bark. But he is also something more significantly vicious than even Laughton imagined. He is a priest of the Bitch Goddess who makes human sacrifices to Success. He is a Puritan on a poopdeck.

* In historical fact, Captain Bligh lost nothing. He was absolved of blame for the mutiny, and later rose to the rank of vice-admiral.

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