![]() History, kinder to this amazing man, discloses that he rose to be an admiral in the King's navy.There are numerous performances of excellence under the relentless eye of Mr. At the court-martial the film punishes Bligh by submitting him to the contempt of his fellow-officers. I could have wished that these superb sequences telling of Bligh's indomitable will to live and find vengeance had been extended at the expense of the romantic business on Tahiti. Yet, on the astounding odyssey in the small boat, Bligh becomes a man of heroic stature, fiercely guiding the rudder through the ocean wastes while his men lose their senses from thirst and hunger. From the swish of the lash he derives a lewd joy.Bligh's reign of terror on the Bounty is described with such relish that in time you discover yourself wincing under the lash and biting your mouth to keep from crying out. His penalties for minor offenses are the judgments of a maniac. Brought to the Bounty, he is discovered to be already dead from his previous floggings, but Bligh, observing the cold letter of the regulations, insists that the corpse receive the appointed forty lashes in full view of his officers and men. We get the full horror of his personality early in the film when a seaman, convicted of striking an officer, is ordered to be lashed on every vessel in the fleet. Laughton's performance as the incredible Bligh is a fascinating and almost unbearable portrait of a sadist who took rapturous delight in watching men in pain. Condemned with the rest, Byam, in the film, is pardoned after an eloquent speech in which he informs the court-martial of the conditions which drove Christian and the crew to mutiny.Mr. ![]() ![]() Midshipman Byam and several other loyal seamen who were forced to accompany the rebels were returned to England for trial. In the photoplay, though not in fact, Bligh commands the second British ship which pursues the mutineers and is wrecked in the futile search. Bligh and eighteen loyal men were set adrift with the ship's launch in mid-Pacific, while the triumphant mutineers put back to Tahiti.Miraculously Bligh took his open boat 3,600 miles across the ocean to the Dutch East Indies, a feat that is almost unparalleled for skill and courage in nautical annals. Discharging her cargo at Tahiti, the Bounty was sailing for home when Christian, the second in command, led the mutinous sailors and seized the ship. The spirit of revolt grew among both officers and men during the voyage as Bligh's mania for discipline increased in fury. Bounty, commanded by the able but intolerably savage Lieutenant Bligh, left England bound for Tahiti. This is a crowded and fascinating canvas, but the film tends to become slack and dissipate some of its terrifying power because of the sheer burden it Imposes on the spectator of watching the screen for more than two hours.The history of the celebrated naval case will not suffer if I summarize it briefly. If the work has a flaw, it stems from Metro's characteristic prodigality. For all its great length, this is just about the perfect adventure picture.The film concentrates on the first two volumes of the trilogy, "Mutiny on the Bounty" and "Men Against the Sea," and touches only slightly on the fate of the mutineers as they prepare to face permanent exile with their Tahitian women on the uncharted Pitcairn's Island. Frank Lloyd, well remembered for "The Sea Hawk" and "Cavalcade," has performed a distinguished job of direction. As the sadistic master of the Bounty, the barbarous madman who was half god and half devil, Charles Laughton has the perfect roƓle, and he plays it perfectly. The Nordhoff-Hall trilogy was, of course, born to be filmed, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has given it the kind of production a great story deserves. Grim, brutal, sturdily romantic, made out of horror and desperate courage, it is as savagely exciting and rousingly dramatic a photoplay as has come out of Hollywood in recent years. Bounty is magnificently transferred to the screen in "Mutiny on the Bounty," which opened at the Capitol Theatre yesterday.
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