The Academy Awards are so obviously pointless that it’s much more clichéd these days to describe them as a masturbatory gala of self-congratulation than defend them with any seriousness. Well, of course they’re an onanistic exercise: imagine General Mills, Post and Kellogg’s holding a televised breakfast cereal of the year award. Yes, Hollywood movies are sometimes art, but they’re cultural product first and foremost, and, along with television and music, they make up America’s largest export industry.
So doubly irrelevant, you might continue, is the award of “Best Picture.” But you’d be wrong. True, the list of Best Picture winners hardly matches the list of the best Hollywood films, and, especially recently, contains a lot of out and out stinkers (Crash, anyone?) But they show what the industry considered, in any given year, its most serious and important work. It’s an intra-democratic process of self-criticism, and you can learn a lot about a society by what its taste-makers (and, with the increasingly de-industrialized economy, its power brokers) find most attractive when they look in the mirror.
Which is to say that 1935’s Best Picture winner, Mutiny on the Bounty, is not one of the best films of all time. It’s not even the best Hollywood film of 1935, a year which saw A Night at the Opera, Top Hat and the pulpy and awesome The Devil is a Woman. But it is a good movie, at once an exciting adventure film with great performances, and an allegory of Great Depression America’s complicated relationship to authority and hierarchy.
In terms of production and reception, Mutiny is similar to another “Best Picture” Titanic. It takes place on a boat, of course, but was also famously expensive and long in the making ($2 Million over two years, which was extreme for 1935), and incredibly popular. Like Titanic, a great part of the appeal was its total spectacle. Filled with surprisingly brutal violence (at least for the time), rife with special effects (some of which have aged better than others), a healthy dose of romance (of the most Orientalist kind), and shot on location in Tahiti, the movie moves fast and is a pleasure on the eyes.
Thematically, however, it’s more like a capitalist Battleship Potemkin. It portrays the final voyage of the H.M.S Bounty, which sailed from England to Tahiti to procure breadfruit trees, intended for the West Indies, where they’d become cheap food for slaves. Historically accurate in its broad strokes, but fictionalized in its specifics, (it’s based on a series of historical novels about the incident, not the events themselves) it tracks the sadistic captain William Bligh’s (Charles Laughton) conflict with Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable) and the rest of the crew.
Bligh runs his ship with the whip and the shackle, and it’s no wonder that after five months’ idyllic rest in Tahiti, the crew, led by Christian, mutiny against his violent tyranny on the way back to the West Indies, sending him off in a small launch while the mutineers return to Tahitian paradise. Laughton’s performance as the monomaniacal Bligh simmers with the brutal malice of insecure authority, and is the best reason to watch the film. Gable, who shaved his trademark mustache for the sake of historical accuracy, remains impossibly handsome no matter how long he’s been at sea, and spends a good portion of the film shirtless. He also does a solid turn as the morally conflicted do-gooder protagonist.
The tortured everyman crew, formed mostly of conscripted prisoners, resembles Capra’s populist ensembles. And the film’s editing is incredible: there’s some honest-to-god Eisenstein-ian socialist montage, where the hardened faces of the crew cut rapidly with the difficult labor of running the ship. But Mutiny, like Capra’s work, is ultimately democro-capitalist: as soon as the mutiny is completed, Christian, not the crew/proletariat, becomes the de facto leader. And the social upshot of the mutiny is merely a change in British policy regarding officer-sailor relations.
Thus, the ultimate use of individualized class action is to encourage reform within the system. The implications of slavery, prisoner conscription for the navy, and hierarchical chains of economic command never come into question. The film captures both the anxieties and the desires of the ruling class in American society at a time of great unrest, hiding ideology behind populist heroism. It’s no wonder this film beat out the anarchic class-warfare of the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera for picture of the year.
Still, the film is a great lot of fun, gorgeously shot and featuring a remarkable performance from Laughton. It drags a bit in its conclusion, but it has some of the best Hays code sex scenes ever recorded (i.e. incredibly witty fade-to-black cross cuts), and is a must see for any fan of the swashbuckling sub-genre.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Theatrical trailers of this and the 1965 remake, a 30 second newsreel about its Oscar win (in which Frank Capra himself hands the award to producer Irving Thalberg), and a really awesome newsreel called Pitcairn Today about the real historical story and the mutineers’ descendants who still inhabit Pitcairn island, where the mutineers ended up. The Blu-ray also comes in nifty packaging, shaped like a book with a thirty page pamphlet about the movie inside, although it’s fairly awkward to read due to the positioning of the disc’s plastic mount.
"Mutiny on the Bounty" is on sale November 16, 2010 and is not rated. Adventure. Directed by Frank Lloyd. Written by Talbot Jennings, Jules Furthman, Carey Wilson. Starring Charles Laughton, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone.
