1935 Mutiny on the Bounty

1935 Mutiny on the Bounty

Enjoyed this movie.  Two years in a row of Clark Gable!  Odd seeing him without his mustache.  It was a big deal for him to shave for the movie.

Had quite good cinematography, especially considering when it was made.

Acting was good, story was good.  Not all that accurate, apparently, which prompted me to rent Bounty with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson, as it is considered much more accurate.   

Fletcher and Bligh.

It's about a mutiny on the HMS Bounty, if that hadn't already been gleaned from the title.  The Bounty leaves England for Tahiti in order to gather breadfruit plants, and the sailors have a pretty great time there in the sun with scantily clad Tahitian women.  On the way back, an officer, Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable), leads a group of men in taking the ship from the captain, William Bligh.  They set him, and Bligh out to sea on a small boat.  According to Wikipedia, "Bligh then navigated the 23-foot (7 m) open launch on a 47-day voyage to Timor in the Dutch East Indies. Equipped with a quadrant and a pocket watch and with no charts or compass, he recorded the distance as 3,618 nautical miles (6,710 km)."

Tahiti.

The movie depicted William Bligh as pretty brutal, and in real life, I guess he wasn't.  It was more that the mutineers wanted to head back to Tahiti.  But Clark Gable the hero makes a better movie that Clark Gable the traitorous lech.

Bligh and his men left at sea in a lifeboat.

Really liked Annie Oakley that year, too, but Mutiny was more deserving of the Oscar -historical accuracy be damned!