“Discipline’s the thing. A seaman’s a seaman, a captain’s a captain. And a midshipman is the lowest form of animal life in the British navy.”
Twelve films were nominated for the Outstanding Production Academy Award of 1935. Aside from the eventual winner, Frank Lloyd’s Mutiny on the Bounty, which was produced by MGM, five other titles may be known to modern viewers: Captain Blood, David Copperfield, Les Miserables, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Top Hat. There were also two imminently watchable genre movies left out of the year’s list of nominees, The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Bride of Frankenstein, meaning we should tread carefully when considering the taste of Academy members. Yet Mutiny on the Bounty is both a fine film and a great example of Classical Hollywood studio style before World War II.
Promoted with the tagline, “A Thousand Hours of Hell For One Moment of Love!” the film was adapted by Jules Furthman, Talbot Jennings, and Carey Wilson from the 1932 novel of the same name by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. With a production budget of $2 million[1], Mutiny on the Bounty opens in 1789 with iron-fisted Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton) filling up the empty spots in his crew with a press gang. Then Bligh sets sail for the Pacific Ocean, supported by his temperate right hand, Lt. Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable).
Despite Christian’s fairness with the crew, Bligh’s cruelty slowly rots away at morale. When the Bounty visits Tahiti to re-supply and make repairs, several crew members fall in love with native women and prove reluctant to leave when Bligh gives the order to sail. After returning to sea, the rebellious spirit overcomes the crew, and Christian leads a mutiny against Bligh, pitching the captain overboard into a raft with a handful of loyalists while the mutineers return to Tahiti.
Through an awesome show of discipline and brilliant seamanship, Bligh manages his rescue and return to England, and the mutineers realize they will be hunted men, now responsible for island families to protect. So, they re-board the Bounty and sale for Pitcairn Island, hoping to live anonymous lives beyond the reach of the British Navy.
Throughout the film Laughton electrifies as Captain Bligh, just as Gable’s sympathetic Fletcher Christian pushes his already-recognized marquee appeal into Hollywood super stardom. Interestingly, Laughton was seasick throughout production, and Gable was forced to shave his moustache to achieve historical accuracy, and the reason to note these obstacles in the lives of screen performers is to recognize the requirements of MGM’s studio style that was based on literary sourcing of proto-cinematic material to create epic entertainment with sweeping historical backdrops and rich performances.
The point is further made by realizing MGM’s influence over the first 12 years of the Academy Awards ceremonies from 1927-1939. Although there were five “major” studios in operation during the period—Loews/MGM, Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros., and RKO—alongside three “minor” studios—Columbia, Universal, and United Artists—MGM enjoyed five picture-of-the-year wins for The Broadway Melody in 1928-1929, Grand Hotel in 1931-1932, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Great Ziegfeld in 1936, and Gone with the Wind in 1939. Dispute over the merits continues through the present, but it’s clear that the awards weren’t given simply for the greatness of individual films so much as they crowned powerful people whose egos and wallets made these films, among dozens of others, possible.
Here, we remember that MGM head Louis B. Mayer was a prime mover behind setting up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and it follows that MGM would be prominent in the public relations boon that would eventually be called the Oscars ceremony.[2] Likewise, MGM movies were exactly the type most suited to the taste of Academy voters precisely because MGM’s films closely reflected Mayer’s sensibilities, not to overlook his status as profit leader in the motion picture business.
Mayer’s peculiar formula, which may seem obvious today, was to combine the biggest stars of the moment with the most celebrated source material and then producing films with the best craftspeople in Hollywood. This simple coup of combining talent, skill, and big budgets led to the wholesale dominance of MGM from the 1920’s through the 1940s, and all of this was made possible through adherence to strict employment contracts, thereby requiring Laughton to manage his seasickness and Gable to shave his mustache.
One effect of this dominance is that MGM’s films were unique in comparison to the work of other studios that were similarly pigeonholed according to the taste of their dominant producers, contract talent, and various commercial considerations. Where MGM concentrated on star-studded productions, largely developed from bestselling books and stage hits, Warner Bros. used smaller budgets to explore more socially conscious melodramas while Universal focused on B-movie horrors and westerns, and this divergence continued through the other studios—Columbia, RKO, Paramount, Fox, and United Artists—each of which had a unique market segment to attract and serve.
While borders between studios were occasionally open to collaboration, each house was differentiated from the others because of the associated artisans, actors, and actresses that were easily sorted according to growing filmographies. In other words, contract players worked only for their employer, by law and by custom, so it was always clear that Bette Davis belonged to Warner Bros., as just one prominent example from the 1930s serves to remind us.
For Mutiny on the Bounty, producer Irving Thalberg hired the Fox director Frank Lloyd who had previously been celebrated for Cavalcade in 1933. He then hired in-house art directors Cedric Gibbons and A. Arnold Gillespie, the cinematographer Arthur Edeson, and former Mayer protégé turned editor Margaret Booth. Complimenting their efforts were the composers Nat W. Finston and Herbert Stothart and a supporting cast filled out by the likes of Franchot Tone with James Cagney and David Niven in uncredited bit parts.
One effect of this combined pool of talents carefully funneled through Thalberg is a film of unqualified beauty. Mutiny on the Bounty has a richly textured look and feel that remains stunning to this day, though to a greater degree when projected instead of screened on home theater equipment. Consideration must also be given for the acting styles of the mid-1930s that differ from today’s more naturalistic tendencies, not to overlook the film’s broad appeal that avoids controversial content, as per then-predominant censorship restrictions defined by the Production Code Administration, save depicting the crime of mutiny, which is justified in the story world as a necessary response of honest men to the cruelty of a tyrant.
[1] Using the calculators at https://www.usinflationcalculator.com, the budget is close to $30,000,000 today.
[2] This phrase was first used in 1934.
–August 31, 2022
