Friday, November 18, 2022

Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

IMDb plot summary: In 1787, British ship Bounty leaves Portsmouth to bring a cargo of bread-fruit from Tahiti but the savage on-board conditions imposed by Captain Bligh trigger a mutiny led by officer Fletcher Christian.
Directed by Lewis Milestone. Starring Marlon Brando, Trevor Howard, and Richard Harris.

Mutiny on the Bounty is a 1962 film about a British Navy crew on an agricultural expedition who are driven to mutiny by their cruel captain. Note that even though the plot of the movie is in the title, the idea of mutiny doesn't truly come to fruition until a good 2/3 of the way through the movie, as most of it is setting the stage for the uprising. This version of the story casts Trevor Howard as the ruthless Captain Bligh and Marlon Brando as his second-in-command who has a more sympathetic view of the crew. This movie is nearly three hours long and while I appreciate the dedication to plenty of setup, there is easily a full hour of this movie that could have been cut without losing anything at all. (The exoticized portrayals of the island of Tahiti and the sex-positive women there take up entirely too much screentime.) What I did appreciate was Brando's performance, to which he brings a thoughtfulness and really highlights the struggle within him to respect the procedures in place but also to protect his men. Those moments were the most interesting for me to watch, and they were what helped the movie ultimately land. A bloated story but there's definitely some substance to this portrayal as well.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Mutiny on the Bounty > Corpse Bride
Mutiny on the Bounty < Anna Karenina
Mutiny on the Bounty < Die Hard
Mutiny on the Bounty < Fanboys
Mutiny on the Bounty < The Mummy (1999)
Mutiny on the Bounty > It's Kind of a Funny Story
Mutiny on the Bounty > The Dissident
Mutiny on the Bounty > Cabaret
Mutiny on the Bounty > Deceiver
Mutiny on the Bounty < Gold Diggers of 1933
Mutiny on the Bounty > Celeste and Jesse Forever
Final spot: #1750 out of 3724, or 53%.

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