A Film Canon

 

 

Mutiny On The Bounty presents an interesting counterpoint to The Battleship Potemkin, particularly in its uncertainty about whether to understand the mutineers' grievances as the symptom of a single personality - the tyrannical Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton) - or of a more pervasive, systemic oppression. In this light, the film has various concluding gestures, the most categorical of which seems to opt for the former, epitomised by Captain John Byam's (Franchot Tone) defence of Captain Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable): "No finer man ever lived. I don't try to justify his crime, his mutiny, but I condemn the tyranny that drove him to it." That said, this is immediately followed by a tokenistic epilogue in which George III acknowledges the need for some "new understanding between officers and men." More bravely, Lloyd concludes Christian's narrative with two summative images - the burning of the Bounty and the settlement of Pitcairn Island - or, rather, a single image of heroic, abstracted settlement. Given its proximity to the War of Independence, it's hard not to read this radical, if subsidiary, possibility as an analogy for the settlement of America itself, making Gable's conspicuous accent - as well as his taste for demotic reasonableness, as opposed to Laughton's formal pomposity - less incongruous. The result is a tentative dialectic, encapsulated in the partial integration of the Bounty crew with the Tahitians, who provide everything apparently unavailable aboard ship: women, food and, above all, generosity. Political implications aside, it's an extraordinarily entertaining film, partly because of the charismatic dynamic between Gable and Laughton, and partly because of the ingenuity with which Lloyd maps the symbolic co-ordinates of the Bounty. This ensures that, for the viewer as well as the sailor, the ship becomes something capable of superseding the world and all its wonder, explaining the catastrophic implications of mutiny.